Artigianati.com

by Ellen Sussman

Maggie Gordon’s entire home — indoors and out — is her working bead studio, and millions of tiny beads like it here.

Indoors there are watercolor-palette dishes of beads being used in current design work and about 120 drawers in bead cabinets with ice cube-tray compartments filled with every size, shape and color of bead.

In the front courtyard is a table where Gordon likes to do her beading. The top is a thick slab of what was once an old mill wheel. The entire surface is pitted, rutted and rough and Gordon says it’s perfect for catching dropped or runaway beads.

Though dictionaries define a bead as “a small, usually round piece of glass, wood, stone etc. pierced and intended to be strung with others like it on a thread or wire,” Gordon’s works bring new meaning to the word.

Starting an artistic career in pottery and ceramics, it was while living in St. Paul, Minn., that she was asked to teach Native American children attending an urban school how to bead.....

Read more at  - http://www.gvnews.com/articles/2010/02/03/news/89beads0203.txt