Santa Cruz Beads

2 weeks ago (June 26th) was our second anniversary.  The hubby and I decided to take a mini-vacation and get out of town for a few days.  We headed up to San Francicso to stay with my aunt & uncle for the weekend.  On the way up there, we stopped in Santa Cruz over night.  We stayed in a beautiful Victorian Bed & Breakfast  right across the street from the Santa Cruz pier.  I really wish we could have stayed longer there, because it as beautiful!  Santa Cruz is one of the only piers in California that still has it's boardwalk operational, complete with carnival rides and a 100+-year-old carousel!    As soon as I sort through the rest of my photos from the trip I'll post some of them here because that pier is really cool - there is a whole layer underneath the pier that you can access and all kind of animals live down there!  The best part about our day in Santa Cruz - we found two bead stores!  I scored just a couple of things at each store, but it was fun to sort through all the goodies, and to see how the stores differed from the ones I'm used to down here.  I think the one thing that was most different for me was that most of their inventory was sold "by the bead" rather than "by the strand".  I usually prefer to buy my beads by the strand because I tend to shop by inspiration (hence the name of this blog) rather than because I have a specific project in mind.  This means that I will rarely know how many of each bead I will want for a design, I will just buy which ever strands speak to me and hope I can find something to go with them later!  That's not to say that I didn't make some good finds up there.  So, here's where we went, and what I got.

Our first stop was Bead It! in downtown Santa Cruz.  They had an adorable little storefront, right in the walking part of the downtown.  They had a bunch of unique charms (mostly what I picked up) and I had fun looking through them because good charms are hard to find.  I found the Ferris wheel charms that I have been looking for (watch for them on an upcoming project), some brass hedgehogs that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with quite yet but were WAY too cool to pass up, and some really pretty blue glass flower beads.  I wish I could have bought a strand of the blue glass ones, because they were so beautiful!

Our second stop for the day was Monkey Girl Beads.  Like Bead It!, their focus seemed to be individual beads rather than strings (they did have some gemstone strings, but nothing unusual or extraordinary).  despite my preference for strands, I really wish Monkey Girl Beads was closer to my house!  They had such a great selection of silver & plated charms & findings, I nearly spent a small fortune there.  As it was, I spent more here and got way less beads, but they were SO worth it! I got these 5 tiny silver flowers and 2 pairs of tiny silver wings (they're almost actual size in this photo) :

 The other thing that I found that was different up there was that, since you were buying single beads rather than strands, you were given your purchases in tiny bags that were taped shut so the beads wouldn't fall out.  When I was pulling these 2 tiny bags out of my purse later, I felt a little like I had picked up drugs rather than beads :

That's my dime-bag of bead crack from Monkey Girl Beads.  (it's about 2"x2.5")   All in all a good beading experience - and for sure stop into these 2 stores on your next trip to Santa Cruz!  We went to several more bead stores in the San Francisco area, including one in Berkeley, but the inspiration didn't hit again, which was kind of a bummer.  I've found that sometimes it's like that though.  Most days I can go into any bead store and find something that I just have to have, no problem.  But other days, I can go into my favorite store and come out empty handed.  I'm just happy for these finds!

Do you like to stop at bead stores - or other specialty hobby stores -  while on vacation?  Do you have a favorite find from a trip that you wish you could go to again?