Speaking Words of Wisdom: Let It Bead

Patricia Abahusayn has traveled the world collecting beads--big ones, small ones, strange ones, common ones.

She opened her first shop in Saudi Arabia, and when Abahusayn and her husband moved to Irvine 3 1/2 years ago, she opened the Bead Boutique across from UC Irvine. It’s loaded with more than 5,000 beads she’s gathered on journeys to Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries.

Although the shop is mostly about things you string, Abahusayn sees it as more than that. People also come in to repair jewelry, and artisans use the work space to create pieces they sell. Weary parents have their children’s birthday parties there. Making necklaces, bracelets, anklets and earrings out of (you guessed it) beads is one of kids’ favorite things to do, says Abahusayn.

This is another in a series of first-person columns that allow people connected to the fashion industry to talk about their encounters.

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My husband gets exacerbated when we travel because as soon as we land in a city, I take out the yellow pages and look under “Bead Supplies.” I want to bring back some of the tradition from these places.

I am a collector of interesting pieces of old, ethnic jewelry from around the world. A lot of them need to be reworked into something usable and wearable. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I found other women who also had pieces, and I started teaching them how to redesign and string the pieces they had and incorporate complementary beads into them.

We still do this at our shop. A lot of people have jewelry in their drawers that is broken and they can fix it here. They can restring it and restyle it, if they want. We’ll help them or we can do it for them.

People come in to repair something, and then they look around at the finished products on display, and they get ideas about creating something new. They usually come back to make something. It can become quite addictive. Some of those people are now doing it as a business. We now sell some of our finished products at a cart at MainPlace/Santa Ana.

Boys wear jewelry now as much as girls, so we have some boys in junior high and high school who come in to make things for themselves. Men come in to buy gifts for their wives, and they might want something personalized with their name spelled out in individual beads, strung on silver or 14-karat chains.

Parents bring their little kids here because we have a table designed for them. Parents can say, “Pick anything from this table,” because all of the about 400 beads are 5 cents each. They can make a necklace for $1 or $2.

We have medium-range priced beads made of glass, wood, ceramics and natural materials, that cost from 10 cents to $1.25 each. The finished piece may cost $3 to $10, but we think it would cost $25 to $40 in a department store.

We also do a large business with professional women who love the higher-end gemstones. They can make lapis or pearl necklaces or other necklaces for $20 to $150, but again it would cost them four times that to buy in a jewelry store.

It’s a creative activity, and you can design something to suit yourself in price, length, color and material used.