Where to start.. Well, I’ve been back for quite a while from another divine adventure in France during July and August last year with glass bead making friends Nadine Piskadlo and Frederic Marey. Just after I arrived in early July, it was time for the exhibition I have dreamed about for ten years or so. It came to be in a beautiful Museum in Berck Sur Mer. It’s really silly for me to be finally telling you about this exhibition now, a few days before it closes, when it opened on July 16th last summer on a beautiful sunny day.
The museum invited any glass bead artists anywhere to submit a piece on Sun Wind and Sea. The chosen beads for this show will stay in a permanent collection there because it is a Maritime Museum and how perfect is that!
The other part of the exhibition consisted of beads I bought and borrowed several years ago with this kind of show in mind. Most of them found their way into the exhibition with the name of the artist clearly displayed. Pretty tough for someone as disorganized as me to keep the names with the beads for so many years. Some of them had already been shown in a museum in the Midlands, England called Broadfield House, but they were in a clear box on the top floor without names clearly attached if I remember correctly.
I have just found the original list of the beads I had carefully over several years collected and carried to England in the beginning…
The list is dated 1998, and I had spent a couple of years before that collecting them and getting them home to England.

So here is that yellowed old fax sent to me by Plowden and Thompson on 26 Jun 1999.

BEAD SOCIETY AGM 1998

Unless indicated otherwise, all beads on loan from the artists. * indicates on loan from the
collection of Kate Drew-Wilkinson.

Strung beads

Left
whole necklace by Kate Drew-Wilkinson
Donated by the artist to Broadfield House Glass Museum, 1997

Centre, starting from top left blue/gold bead, clockwise.
Patricia Frantz
Dudley Gibberson*
Lark Dalton & Corrie Haight, Olive glass x 2
cay dickie*
Donna Milliron*
Janice Peacock
Tom Holland
Della Armstrong, Dancing Rabbit Designs
Lucinda Lesuer Brown
Nancy Pilgrim
Lynne Elliot
Loren Stump*
Kristina Logan*
Mary Kennedy*
Kristen Frantzen Orr
Derek Jones & Sally Hanson
Tom Boylan*
Michael Barley, Hori Designs
Linda Burnette
Patricia Frantz*

Michelle Boeck (centr angel)
Julie Wuest, Leopard Heart Glass

Right: starting from top right, clockwise:
Art Seymour*
Robert Jennik, Pilamaya Glass
Janice Peacock
Rowena
Andrea Guarino*
unknown
James & Neva Wuerfel

Asha* (centre)

So, if any of you see this and either think or remember lending me a bead for a show in Europe when the Best Bead Show was still happening at, er, was it the Red Roof or a Howard Johnsons round about 1997 probably, get in touch and when the beads come home,I can give you back the loaners. I will probably have the whole collection with me at the Bead Expo 2007 in Oakland in April, along with the book,or catalog from the Museum, of the show. Not very clear, but I’m workin’ on it…

By the way, there were lots of others in the expo too, beads that I carried during this new century!

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