Beading Friendship - Marcia

I took a class at Chicago's City Beads last week by my good friend Marcia DeCoster. It was a typical MADDesign, clever and pretty (see the result on the post Photo Diary - Day 14). It's always lovely to see Marcia.

A nice dinner after class with NanC, Bev and Lisa,
all bead wizards from around here

Marcia and I go back quite a while, almost to when I started beading 6 years ago. It was actually Atlanta-now-San Francisco-based Joanne who introduced me to beads. She was the human resources rep for the company that relocated us as expats from Holland to Georgia, and she took her job seriously. She worked hard to make GABROEN feel at home, with her guiding principle that the majority of expat assignments fail because of unhappy spouses. And she most definitely was not going to have that happen. So one day she asked Jeroen how I was doing, and if I would be interested in joining her to go to a bead show. A lot of things were new to us those first couple of months in the US, and the concept of a bead show was certainly one of them. But I did go with Joanne, and it gave me a first glance into the world of beads, as well as a friendship for life.

Once I got a taste of beads, Joanne and I joined a beading class by Marcia at the local ATL store Beadazzles. A few years earlier, Marcia had been on an assignment in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. She loved living in the Netherlands, and once she realized she had a Dutch student in her Atlanta class, she was thrilled to talk 'oliebollen', 'stroopwafels' and other Dutch delights. Her class was great, and it gave me a good glance in bead glamour and right angle weave techniques, as well as another newfound friendship.

Since then, Marcia and I remained friends mainly through the internet. We do try to let our paths cross somewhere in the world; I have visited her beautiful art deco home three times now, they spent one Christmas in our Amsterdam home, and we both joined the Seed Bead Summit at Kate McKinnon's in Tucson. We saw each other at last year's Bead&Button in Milwaukee, and we are planning to get together for her master class at this year's show.

At the Seed Bead Summit in Kate McKinnon's home in Tucson

I was DELIGHTED when Marcia asked me late last year to showcase my beadwork in a book she is curating. The book is a collection of bead artists who use the internet to maintain a beading community. After weeks of finalizing my pieces to complete my collection and after Jeroen spent many evenings taking high quality photographs, I submitted my work. I can't wait to see the result, as well as the work by the other artists. The book is scheduled to come out early 2014.

One of my pieces - "Van Gogh's Blooming Acacia"

Thank you Marcia for being an inspiration and a good friend.

GABROEN on behalf of Gabriella