Showcase 500 Beaded Jewelry: Photographs of Beautiful Contemporary Beadwork

Opening this gorgeous hunk of a book is like walking into a high-end jewelry gallery. There are 500 full-color photographs of beaded jewelry—necklaces, rings, bracelets, pins and earrings—created by 275 artists with beads, wire, filament, and fiber. Some of the artists are well-known to beaders, like Carol Wilcox Wells and Diane Fitzgerald, and some not-so-well-known, with their work published for the first time. This makes for a heady blend of inspiration, ideas, and expression. Editor Hemachandra selected the 500 beaded objects from submissions by 360 artists from 30 countries. To his credit, no single style—bead weaving, bead embroidery, bead stringing—gets short shrift. The photography is of high professional standards, no Instagram shots by amateurs posted to Facebook, and is also instructively illustrative of the beadwork, offering closeup shots that will help the aspiring bead worker reproduce some of the techniques. One quibble: it would have been nice to include the artists’ countries of origin just below the photo of their work instead of in the index, saving the reader a lot of flipping back and forth. A list of artists’ Web sites would have been nice, too. (Aug. 7)