3rd Annual Bristol Trollbead Crawl.

If you follow me on Twitter (@Mokeymike) where I was live tweeting the whole day) you will have seen that I was lucky enough to attend the 3^rd Annual Bristol Trollbead Crawl. Organised by a couple of very lovely ladies (and avid collectors) the idea is for a group of Trollbead collectors to get together and go to all the local retailers.

I had agreed with myself that I would only buy one bead. Probably the Agate Dendritic or Ruby Rocks as these beads vary so much it’s worth seeing them in real life and the retailers had ordered extras for us to admire.

We all met at Cribbs and headed off in a convoy of 3 cars. Our first stop took us to Gifted in Nailsea (BS48 1RG, if you fancy taking a trip there yourself – but don’t buy the tigers eye or Silver Retired Clown that I wish I had bought!) they had laid out a table with lots of OOAKs (glass and amber) New beads on bracelets and multiples of the Brand new (and unreleased Royal Orange bead) Ruby Rocks and Agate Dendritic. They also had the beautiful Aurora Bangle!

They offered us a really generous 10% off all purchases and I had to take advantage when I saw a beautiful Agate that was really black with a few specks of white in it. In all the photos I have seen this bead has been mostly white with a few black bits. I want to, one day, own all the precious stones and this one works brilliantly as a juxtaposition to the Tormulated Quartz.

The lovely Ladies at Gifted had made up a goody bag which had some lovely smelling hand cream, a pack of novelty tissues and a little notebook. A few lucky ladies also got a sparkly mini torch for pre-ordering the new Aurora.

After Gifted we headed to Sue Foster in Clifton (BS8 4BT) this was a really cute boutique with lots of pieces of jewellery that Sue herself calls eclectic. She had trays and trays of beads and they seemed to keep coming! Some really beautiful treasures were snapped up here, but I was being good and didn’t buy anything (even though I saw a bead that went perfectly with my new Orange Dillo – more of that in another post)

It was time for lunch, and after a brief walk in the sun through the wonderful Clifton we headed to a cafe called Fahrenheit 419. The service was a little slow, but this just gave us chance to examine the morning’s purchases, look at the AMAZING collections everyone was wearing. Play with the swap beads and admire Beth’s Small and Beautiful beads.

Time was running away with us, and it was time to head to Jools in Bristol (BS1 3XA) I was really looking forward to this, as you know, I love Jools and they had got lots of stock in for us, so they had more retired beads and OOAKs than usual. They also ran a competition so for every bead bought you got a raffle ticket to win the White Jewellery Box. We spent a very long time playing with the beads, lots of ladies wanted the retired pink prism, so we destroyed their displays to choose from them all! Ooops!

While we were all playing with all the beads I saw lots of beads I had never seen before, the retired Polar Bear is lovely, but I couldn’t work out how it would look on a bracelet. I did however get talked into buying Tupilak, an early Trollbead which is small like Mocha, but has 3 faces on it. I was umming and ahhing about it and then I realised that 2 of the faces shared one mouth, not only is this cute, but it work really well with my love of symmetry and I had to have it!

I also saw an amazing Red Tigers Eye which had the most brilliant flashes in it! Better than any I had ever seen, so I had to have that too. And then I saw a Wave of dreams with a lovely Greeny/Blue wave and a dark half and a light half and I knew this had to become part of my collection too as it would work with so many of the beads I have already.

My Days Purchases

The last stop for me was House of Frasier. I was a bit worried about going here, because although Nic works there, I have never received very good service from them and their stock levels have always been a bit poor. But the ladies organising the trip had been in and met a lovely member of staff and told me that they had lots of stock in. Unfortunately, as soon as I got there a member of staff was really rather rude, and when the rest of the gang turned up it only got worse. Luckily there was another sales assistant that could help those not put off the beautiful beads, and she even took the wrist shot, making an official part of the gang!

The rest of the Crawl continued to another Jewellers, but I had to give it a miss.

A massive thank you to Helen and Amanda, and here is to next year! (Hopefully a few more people can join us!) :D