Books! Books! Books!

I love books! Adore them... admire them.  Even bad books... books are wonderful and lovely and I'm so pleased that my hubby and daughter are book lovers also.  You should see the slush pile to be read ... probably over 100 books piled on the TV waiting their turn.

It's not only fiction that I adore... I love biographies and history books... and of course books on beading and jewelry making.

While I do not believe, other than from a storage viewpoint, one can have too many books... it's that storage viewpoint that wins in the end.  Either that, or you have to buy a bigger house.  Since my house is already ridiculously big for a family of 3 people and 4 cats... well, sometimes the collection has to be pruned.

We did this for our regular books this past summer when we had our first ever ( and possibly only) garage sale.

I occasionally weed out jewelry books in January, and sell them at the great, annual beady garage sale at my local beadshop, Artistic Bead.

This year it's 1/19/13 10-2pm.   How it works is you package and inventory items you no longer want, bring it into the store and for a small cut of the sales, Cheryl sales them for you.  Even the years I don't sell anything I really look forward to checking out what other people no longer want to play with.  I've picked up some great stuff over the years... and at great pricing.  And in turn got rid of stuff I didn't want.

I haven't really gone through my books and magazines thoroughly for some time, so today I started to leaf through books and it struck me how much my jewelry has changed over the years.. especially in the last 2.

When I started, I started with seed beads.  When I started to sell jewelry, I did mostly stringing.  Now I'm working with wire, metal and reclaimed items.  I still do the other stuff, but they are no longer my driving passion.

Several of the books on my shelves are devoted to seed beading.  While I'm going to keep some, I certainly don't need everything I have.

In fact I think I'll be looking with a very critical eye toward my magazine collections.  I stop getting and reading Bead & Button magazine 2 years ago.  To that point, I have every issue... including the impossible to find first year of them.

Do I really need to keep them now?  I haven't decided yet, but  if you had asked me a few weeks ago I wouldn't have considered it.

Back in the 1990's when I started, the big rage in seed beading was Russian.  I  bought every Russian bead book I could get my hands on---- but I went through them today, and nothing really called my name.  I am keeping a couple of them, but the rest are going in the sale pile.  A couple of years after the Russian craze, Japanese books -- very nice slick paper,  mostly designs with crystals and seeds -- hit the scene and again I bought several.  Again I'll probably keep some, but I'm sure some will find their way into the pile.

This makes me eye my Delica collection.  (for those who don't know, they are incredible precise precision made seed beads from Japan) I've not bought any Delica beads in YEARS... but I haven't used them for that long either.  Yet, I have probably 250+ colors of them neatly stored in my studio.  I know I'd never get my money out of them ( they are hideously expensive) and yet, thinking about them sitting there, unused, it starting to bother me.

should they stay, or should they go?

These are in the sale pile

I know any books I decide to part with will get fabulous new homes and hopefully become some one's treasure.

Meanwhile, I have lust in my heart for the newest enameling book that's out.  Cause you can never, ever have too many books.