afterglow

You guys-- you need to have a Bead Party.
I had so much fun with the two get-togethers that I had for sharing this BeadforLife stuff. I was so blessed by it. I really encourage you to think about taking an opportunity to do this yourself if you or any of your friends around you like any kind of jewelry at all.

I fall more in love with this stuff every day that it's here in my house. I've worn different random necklaces out a few times and received so many compliments on them. I wore a five-strand multicolored one, a nice fat single strand, a long mauve colored strand, and another long strand that I doubled up to wrap around twice and be shorter. That one was my favorite. It was mostly a ruddy reddish brown, but it had some really deep dark blues in it and on the glass beads in between the paper beads. I love that looking through the piles of jewelry, I still find new pieces I missed before or some other color that stands out to me or that I find new bracelets to compliment a necklace that's caught my eye. I'm going to have a hard time sending it all back... I'd love to keep it all!

I also keep falling in love with the story of BeadforLife itself. Watching the dvd they sent along with the package and hearing the stories of these women and their journey to freedoms through the help of this organization, the good that it's doing for the communities. It's refreshing to see the simplicity of what these women need to be happy... it's a sharp contrast compared to the world we live in here every day. I like that just by sharing these things with my friends, by wearing this jewelry, it makes us all stop and think of what we so often take for granted.

And sending back over $1300 to BeadforLife? I like that too.

$1300. And all it took from me was getting a package in the mail, laying it all out on my dining room table, setting aside an evening and an afternoon to host my friends, preparing some food (African themed of course!)(I'll post recipes later if anyone's intersted), cracking open a bottle of wine, playing a dvd for my friends to watch and after that the cause, the goodwill, the jewelry, it all speaks for itself. Two girls came back after each party, wanting to look through and get some more.

$1300. I can't get over that number. It's crazy to me, because I think the jewelry is very very reasonably priced. It's not like we're buying $50 pieces of jewelry here. I'm talking $5 here and $15 there. Between both parties, I think I had not quite 30 people here. And from that, I'm sending $1300 back to these women and their community. (BeadforLife takes merely 3% of that money for administration. Just three percent. 30 cents out of every $10. Only $39 out of our $1300 The rest of that money goes to the beaders and to community development programs; education, medical programs, housing, etc.)

Savannah and Sawyer are BeadforLife fans too now :)
Savannah has had her eye on one of these pretty pastel pink bracelets this whole time and I finally decided (after her tooth trauma) to buy it for her. Of course Sawyer then wanted one (and they're offered right now buy one, get one free) so he picked out a nice (manly) black one. Savannah had been asking all about the jewelry of course and knew it was made by women in Africa, so I put on the video for them and played the part about how they make the beads. Sawyer sat and watched it three times! We talked about who maybe made their bracelets and how they chose the colors and made it so pretty. Sawyer wore it to church on Sunday and he showed his teacher his bracelet and showed her the little charm on it that says BeadforLife and he was so proud, telling her it was a special bracelet and it was from Africa. Then his teacher showed him the one she was wearing (she had been to my party on Thursday!) and he was just about blown away, so excited to share something special with her!!
Even just today, as I put him down for a nap, he had it on and held it out for me reminding me it was special... he wanted "to sleep with it because it's special to me from Africa and it's special because it's Bead For Life, right mom?"

It was an extremely rewarding thing to be a part of. I met people I didn't know before, had friends of friends of friends in my home sharing food and drink and sifting through piles of beads, got some Christmas shopping done (in February!!) and just really enjoyed the whole experience, knowing it might make a small difference in someone's life on the other side of the world. And! At least a few people I know, from random churches and circles of friends, are probably going to have parties of their own sometime in the near future too (one of them being a fellow book clubber)!
That I'm excited about because, Yay! More jewelry!! A whole batch of different pieces to go through! That's what is so much fun... every single piece is so unique and different from the next one. You never know what you're going to get!!

Anyway. Fun stuff. Fun and worthwhile. What more can you ask for.

Please check it out if you haven't already...
beadforlife.org