While at the Evanston Bead Show, I bought a beautiful hand carved boxwood bead from Riverstone Bead Company. I painstaking chose one bead, since I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, anyway. Chaos ensued as my friend and the proprietor began discussing the transaction and a throng of chatty women suddenly appeared at the booth. I tried to tell both my friend and the proprietor to hold up, I wanted to get a few more things. I felt drowned out by the group of women who made me think of a scene from a Carlos Castaneda book in which a disorderly group of spirits spontaneously appeared in the desert and accosted the protagonist by attempting to bum a ride on his VW Beetle by sitting on the bumpers and standing on the running boards. So, I came away with one bead.
After I got it home, I began puzzling with the hole drilled through the bead to hold the cicada horizontally. I had bought the bead despite this hole, thinking the stem that formed a link between the two pieces of fruit the cicada hung from worked better aesthetically. I decided to fill the hole with the same beads that I used for the peyote stitch cylinder. I attached one of the removable vintage "shank button pinettes" featured in the last post to the cylinder, then attached the cylinder to the cicada bead. I've been wearing it around on my beret. Just today, I went to their website and bought a few more of them and I wasn't fended off by a gaggle of peyote spirits. Soon I'll be sporting a bat, a dragon and a couple of mice on a pumpkin. One at a time, though.
