Douglas W. Johnson
Fine Art Beads

I first came in contact with seed beads in 1970. At first I strung them into necklases using different patterns of color. I loved the colors and was soon shown how to weave them on a loom.

Being a guitar player at the time I decided to make a guitar strap out of beads. So I built a long loom and started weaving a strip of beads to be sewn onto leather. As I was weaving this long strap, I thought it would be nice to get wilder and make a scene out of beads. Imagine a house and barn or even a little village.

So I built a loom that could hold four strips in a row, each strip was 25 beads wide (like my guitar strap) so I ended up with a piece 100 beads wide. I wove each strip seperately and sewn them together when they were done.

It was not until 1990 that I figured out how to connect the rows on the loom ending up with a solid piece when taken off the loom.

I started with about a dozen colors and could not find much more for years. I only made a handful of pieces over the years.

Then in 1986 I found an ad in a magazine for the Garden of Beadin in California. They offered hundreads of colors of beads which got me into beading steadly.

I built a bigger loom and started making pieces of 40-50 thousand beads. As time went on I found more and more sources of beads, built a larger loom and started making pieces of 100,000 beads. Now I am making pieces of two to three-hundread-thousand beads. I stayed exclusively with size 11 seed beads. They are the most common and offer the largest selection of colors. I now have close to a thousand shades of beads.