I’ve since been quietly processing the news that Kalmbach Publishing shuttered both Bead & Button Magazine and its annual flagship exhibition the Bead & Button Show.
Covid19 may have killed the 2020 show, but it revealed larger market flaws and fragility in that part of the hobby trade.
I’m saddened but not entirely surprised. As I said before, this art medium in the US was generally driven over the last 35 years by middle-aged to elderly white women Of A Certain Income.
The B&B Magazine showed the industry changes so clearly over the last five years that I simply didn’t renew my subscription.
There was much more ‘push’ to showcase pressed glass beads with special shapes and multiple holes (the Preciosa line is a good example). These can make the building blocks of interesting bead structures, but it felt like B&B was giving up on other beads and beadworkers.
Beaded gloves, 2014
First, advertising swelled to ridiculous percentages of the magazine, then dropped off steeply. The 2008 recession didn’t help, as middle-class folks trimmed back discretionary income and pricey hobbies.
I could track the overextended and fading post-2008 beading industry, by seeing which companies’ beads went into discount stores like Ross and Tuesday Morning. (I have a lot of those beads.)
Older beaders have also been dying off. Without that loyal and lucrative base, no wonder bead stores and bead shows were having problems.
Could Kalmbach have sold the Bead & Button property to another publisher? Possibly. I believe they shuttered it to hold on to the intellectual property rights for a reboot down the road.
Still, the B&B Show and magazine got me some notice and awards over the years, and I am sorry I was never able to attend. In its heyday the show looked like a lot of fun.
Much handwringing and lamenting from us old ladies centers on beadwork ‘dying out as a hobby’.
Green Desert tapestry, 2002
I’m old enough & aware enough to remember it as a nascent hobby in the mid-70s to mid-80s. Tiny, expensive packages of beads sold in a few hobby stores, dimestores, and notions suppliers. My family wasn’t poor, and my parents tolerated my insane hobbies…but the lessons of the Great Depression stayed with them. I was always a scrounger of cheaper beads.
I remember individual beads. Clunky lapis-blue seed beads from a dimestore necklace in 1976.
Blown-glass lemon earrings from K-mart, in 1977. They’re here in this piece.
Beaded mini screen, 1998
The silky pink-and-white-striped oblong Austrian ‘rice’ beads from a hobby shop in the next town over (1977).
Long $1 necklaces of mixed glass beads sold at the Dillard’s department store, after that next town got *a real mall*, circa 1984.
Also in 1984, a fine-craft art gallery opened in my ranching-and-oilfield town. Gallery 20 exposed me to real artists playing in what I still thought was a hobby.
In the weathered brown-brick Main Street of that town, a dusty old notion store sold feathers, silk flowers, ribbon, and some rare old-stock Czech seed beads and pressed beads.
When I got a car and a little income, I discovered thrift stores. Moving from New Mexico to Arizona in the late 80s introduced me to more bead, thrift, and sewing notions stores.
Most of those are gone now, or changed irrevocably.
That’s okay. Everything changes.
Beadbin at Beads Galore, circa 2012
A new, creative, diverse crowd is already discovering handwork…including beads. These artists were largely shut out of the Kalmbach beading empire because of cost and (let’s face it) some racial and cultural bias.
Bead supply sales are booming on online sales platforms.
Multicultural mediaproperties are showcasing new ranges of hand-craft for new generations.
Automation is killing some jobs, but opening up new industries. If the United States manages to save itself from corporate greed and religiously-driven anti-intellectualism, we’ll be in a place to reinvent the middle-class as stronger, wiser, and more self-aware than ever before.
