Blog for Beaders!

Q: What is an AB finish?

A: “AB,” or Aurora Borealis, is a bead treatment inspired by Northern Lights. It is a coating (usually on one side) applied to glass beads that creates a rainbow or iridescent effect. The effect was invented in 1955 by Swarovski in partnership with Christian Dior.

Have a question you’d like to ask Bailey? Email her at artbeadsfriends@gmail.com or post your question to our blog.

Paper can be expensive and cards even more so. We made three cards and four tags with our Scrap Pad To Go and barely made a dent in it. The paper is beautiful and comes with easy to use die-cut tags, sayings and more. You can easily make dozens of cards and tags with one pad.

Holiday Gift Tags

Holiday Cards

Hybrid Toho Seed Beads

The cutting edge of innovation; for the first time the Japanese TOHO seed bead company has paired up with the Czech glass industry to create seed beads with beautiful Czech glass finishes.

Thanksgiving Journal

I thought a journal might be a nice way for a family to share their thanks and a fun keepsake to pull out each year, even to add to. We chose paper, trim and sayings from our Scrap Pad To Go Brookfield pattern and purchased plain white card stock for journaling at our local craft store. You may use any fun and festive fall paper you like. We decorated our journal with pretty Czech glass leaves, and ribbon and fibers in bright autumn colors. We chose some sterling silver charms with messages of home and family to add sentiment and for more color we embellished our pages with Swarovski hotfix rhinestones.

- Artbeads.com Designer

Q: Is it safe to dry clean my Swarovski crystals?

A: For most clear and regular-colored crystals, it is fine to dry clean. However, avoid dry cleaning AB finishes or other special finishes.

Have a question you’d like to ask Bailey? Email her at artbeadsfriends@gmail.com or post your question to our blog.

New base metal charms

We’ve added 60 new base metal charms to our collection. Choose from a wide selection of western, heart, holiday and sea-themed charms, available in brass or copper plating.

Visit our learning center for fun projects with charms!

Murano Glass Beads

Our customers have been asking for Murano glass, but we were waiting until we could find the absolute best! This beautiful, handmade glass has been a famous product of the Venetian island of Murano for centuries.  Still created in the same delicate process that has been used for over three hundred years, it’s no wonder why bead lovers all over the world travel to Murano to pick up some of these colorful and ornate creations.

The Vault; our finest collection of gemstones.

We are pleased to announce The Vault, an exciting new section dedicated to the finest gemstones that we can find. To launch The Vault, we are introducing gorgeous gemstone bead strands in extremely limited quantity.

Artbeads.com new site search

Artbeads.com has teamed up with search-engine technology and web analytics giant Omniture to bring jewelry designers a new tool that greatly simplifies the task of finding beads and jewelry supplies among their inventory of over 19,000 products. This new website search interface enables customers to easily refine their searches for beads and findings by Category, Type, Material, Size, Origin and Color. Jewelry designers will also appreciate seeing relevant information on jewelry design and jewelry making presented along with their search results. The new search also includes tools dedicated to Swarovski crystal beads and special features that more elegantly handle mistyped or misspelled words.

Gig Harbor, WA (PRWEB) October 16, 2008 — Artbeads.com has teamed up with search-engine technology and web analytics giant Omniture to bring jewelry designers a new tool that greatly simplifies the task of finding beads and jewelry supplies among their inventory of over 19,000 products. This new website search interface is not only very powerful and intuitive, but is also engaging and fun. With the previous search technology, a customer search for silver beads would return over 2,500 items, and that’s where it would end. Now, with just a couple of clicks, that search can be easily refined by Category, Type, Material, Size, Origin and Color, giving jewelry designers a precise list to shop from. All of these options are presented in a clever, user-friendly interface which makes looking for beads and jewelry supplies a joy.

As customers are presented with their search results, a panel on the right side of the page gives them a peek at relevant information on jewelry design and jewelry making found in the site’s “Learning Center.” In addition, by clicking the Learning Center Results header, they will find a crafter’s nirvana: thumbnail views of all of the relevant ideas and a host of search-refinement tools to help those learning to make jewelry. Other goodies can also be found here such as relevant handy tips, fashion trends and other crafting resources which are presented in panel on the right.

“Jewelry designers who are big fans of Swarovski crystal beads will love the steps that Artbeads.com has taken to cater the search experience to these products,” said Devin Kimura, Artbeads.com CEO. At any time in the course of searching the products on the site, customers can click a link to the new “Swarovski Search” and be presented with search refinement tools specific to Swarovski products, including dropdown menus of Swarovski shapes, colors, and styles.

What else? Lots! The new site search employs a “Did You Mean?” feature, suggesting logical alternatives to mistyped search entries. Beaders, you are now free from having to know how to spell “Swarovski”! Typing in “Swravoski” will yield the prompt, ”Did you mean ‘Swarovski”’? Many synonyms are accounted for as well - “letter bead” = “alphabet bead“, “gemstone” = “stone” and, yes, it appears they have accommodated ”Swaro” as an accepted synonym for ”Swarovski” !

The new Artbeads.com search also employs a “Direct Hits” feature which customers will appreciate. Entering in certain text criteria will automatically direct the user to their desired page, bypassing having to visit a search results page. Examples: “fax number” takes you to their ”Customer Service” page, ”5301” takes you to their ”Swarovski 5301 Faceted Bicone” page, and entering in any product’s code takes you to that product’s detail page (eg., ”HTS280” takes you to the ”Hill Tribe Silver Large Brushed Round Bead - HTS280” product page.)

Flexibility is offered in the display of search results. If users want to see more products on a page of search results, they can take advantage of these three options: 1) Toggle between ”View By List” and ”View By Grid”; 2) Increase the number of items displayed per page in the “Show:” drop down menu; and 3) Hide the Learning Center Results pane. Users can also sort the results by a number of criteria, eg., Type, Color, Size and Material (in the Learning Center, one can sort by Theme, Cost and Difficulty Level).

Other helpful features that one has come to expect from such full-featured search solutions are employed as well: quotations (to force the searching of intact phrases, eg. ‘’silver rounds”), negatives (minus sign to exclude terms, eg., ”pendants -wood”, breadcrumbs (to backtrack within your search refinement session), recent searches (to quickly go back to a previous search within the same or previous session.)

Is this too much for the user? Actually… no! Users can always bypass doing any refinements or adjusting any of the view options and directly browse through the search results. (Though they’ll be hard-pressed to avoid experimenting with these fun refinement tools, the nifty color palette tool serving as eye candy in itself). The new search interface isn’t just pretty, it is fast, clearly driven by a powerful engine. It is clear that Artbeads.com has invested a lot of time into planning out this great new tool, and it should prove to deliver a rewarding experience for jewelry designers.

Artbeads.com is a leading provider of beads and jewelry supplies for jewelry designers and the beading community. Artbeads.com caters to the quality conscious designer with products like Swarovski crystal beads and the finest sterling silver beads, but also works vigorously to keep prices low. Thanks to Artbeads buying power those looking for wholesale beads are attracted by wholesale pricing discounts, no minimum order requirements and fast, free shipping anywhere in the US. With a vast learning center, Artbeads.com is also a popular destination for beginners looking for jewelry designs and tips on how to make jewelry.

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