Son of BeadThings!

Hi Everyone,

It's looking a little cloudy today, but mostly it's been a fairly reasonable and mild winter so far, with just a few super cold stretches. I will take it.

Not too much to report project wise. I'm not sure yet what I will tackle next, but there is a ton of stuff to choose from and I need to get through some tool batches soon. Maybe I will make most of next week a grinding week...

Anyhow, today I have something unusual for you. This is an object that I have wanted to make for a long time. It's a Do It Yourself key fob project, called Son of BeadThing. These hefty little beauties are turned and milled from solid bars of 303 stainless steel and are a wild mashup of past and present bead shapes and concepts. They have a 5 flute element combined with the 3 rib shape from the old whistles and the recent 3 rib beads. Also, a small Terminator style "bell" shaped end which can be used to hide the knot.

The through hole for these is not as big as regular beads though so you would need to use either 550 cord with inner strings removed, or some smaller diameter cord stock. These will come simply by themselves and you can supply whatever you want to create your own personalized piece. A pictorial example of how I did one of mine is below. But I leave it totally up to you and YOUR creative imagination as to how you want to finish, assemble and use these, after all, that's the whole point of DIY! It will be cool to see what you all come up with. :)

This is a first run in steel and a smaller batch in lead free brass will come soon...but this may very well be the first and only batch of these as the production costs were just too crazy high for them. I made the cards for them when I was in the middle of turning them, and I listed aluminum and titanium as possible future runs, but now that is looking unlikely. So in other words, there is a good chance that I won't be making these again.

Son of BeadThings will run $75 each plus shipping and I'll make it a two per customer limit on them please. Thanks for swinging by this week and hope everyone is staying warm.

All gone, thank you so much everyone!