Time for another giveaway.  See those gorgeous earth tone beads up top?  Here's your chance to win them. These are African trade bone beads from For The Love Of Beads, a Canadian online store. They are perfect for people who prefer natural styles to glitzy bling.


Team these beads up with wooden or shell beads, gemstones or cord for one of a kind creations. I really like the speckled turquoise colored ones for they are perfect matches for actual turquoise gemstones. The brown ones look like they are eye beads.

For The Love Of Beads is a team of two couples - Emily and Suzanne are the beadaholics who have the fun task of expanding their inventory and managing their store whilst their husbands Mike and Hayden are the webmasters.Do pop into their store and explore. They have a neat color wheel tool on their homepage to help you select by color. What I appreciate about smaller stores like theirs is the selection of more unusual products like their wire pendants. Emily posted a project she did with one of these pendants on their blog - I love how she used a book as a background.

When Emily sent me the photo above, she also included this banner sized photo of an earlier attempt for she knew I would include it. I too have cats who love to check out what I am doing. Hers managed to roll into the picture every time she pressed the shutter as if to say, "These beads are the cat's meow!"


As before, just leave a comment (click at the bottom right of the post where the word "comments" is displayed) and follow the directions.  If you are an email subscriber, click on the post title to be taken to my actual blog where you will see the comments word at the bottom. The captcha code where you type what you see is just a way to make sure you are human and not a spam bot!

The giveaway closes at 7.30pm EST on Sunday September 20. I will pick the winner using random.org and post who won as soon as possible after that.

The contest is open to readers everywhere. If you are shy about using your real name, pseudonames are allowed - funny ones are positively encouraged. Good luck!

Historical note:
African trade beads have a long history of being used as currency. Some of them were glass beads produced in India and Europe and these played a huge role in the exploration of Africa. One remarkable 19th century Englishman took something like 20,000 strings of beads to barter for supplies whilst he was looking for the source of the Nile. He didn't find it but he learned a whole lot about the relative worth of different types of beads equivalent to currency exchange information in our world today. Read my past post on Richard Francis Burton and African Trade Beads - be sure to check out the links at the end for African bead posts like the one on romantic Zulu bead codes.

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Original Post by THE BEADING GEM
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