Mmmm....BEADS....

I am, periodically, an avid beader. It harkens back to the time I spent crafting with my grandma when I was a kid. As a pre-adolescent, I tried my hands at braided bracelets using embroidery floss, and quickly realized that my lack of hand-eye coordination would forever limit my weaving skills to patheticness. Beading seemed like a good alternative, so I worked my way through spools of dental floss, creating what I thought were highly fashionable black beaded necklaces of varying lengths and blackness (I assure you that I was too white-bread to have dillusions of Gothness, but I still believed that anything--ANYTHING--looked better with a black beaded necklace!).

I started small (geddit!) with seed beads, and graduated to bugle, chevron, Cloisonné, lamp work, and everything in between. I would refashion store-bought necklaces and earrings to better suit my needs, and I would drag a complacent John or my sister to bead stores wherever I could find them. When my grandmother passed away, my mom very nicely sent me a beautiful selection of glass, ceramic, and wooden beads that my grandma had collected over the 40 some-odd years of her crafting.

In the last decade or so, I have amassed a serious collection of beads. It started out that I would store them in an old shoe box. Then they got so heavy and were bulging from the seams of the box, I had to transfer them to a plastic shoe box. Then it grew so much that I had to recruit a second plastic shoe box. Now I have four and three-quarters plastic shoe boxes full of beads and in sundry. I know the day is fast approaching where I'll need to figure out some better way to organize my lovelies. I'm a little scared for the future of my bead addiction, though...allow me an analogy that you're probably familiar with. When I was a kid, I saved my money and bought myself what I believed to be the most beautiful little wallet. I filled it with used gift cards, fake credit cards that came in the mail, and tape-laminated "ID" cards I made out of index cards. When I went to junior high and got my first school ID card, I proudly discarded my lame-oh fake ID cards. As I got older and accumulated more cards, I needed a better wallet. Slowly, I accumulated more OMGjustGOTTAhaveonemeatalltimes crap (lip gloss, compact, hair brush, dental floss, pens, etc etc etc etc) that I had to get a purse. I felt awkward and weird carrying around a purse, and would periodically bemoan the "need" to carry one, so I only used one big enough to carry my wallet, a make up compact, and chap stick. Eventually, I decided purses were kinda neat, and I really liked the bigger styles. And I found that the bigger the style, the more STUFF I could successfully carry around. Years later, I'm lugging around modestly HUGE cavernous purses from wince I cannot find a single damned thing (and having a black-case cell phone is the BANE of my existence!). So here's what I'm worried about with my bead addiction. I started out sharing a bedroom with my sister, and had a small tin container with beads. By college, I accumulated enough to warrant a shoe box. College necessitated a plastic shoe box or two. When we moved into the condo, it was two plastic shoe boxes and an old perfume box. By the time we moved into the house, it was almost 5 plastic shoe boxes full. So now I'm worried that I'll go all nutso and buy more BEADS (om nom nom nom nom nom nom) to compensate for the size of the house...

Scary.

Oh me, oh my how pretty!

In the last decade or so, I have ALSO amassed a serious collection of beaded necklaces. Previously, I used shadow boxes I snagged at Target to pin the necklaces up. This worked pretty darned well. But since moving and sorting through my necklaces, I decided I needed a better solution so I wouldn't keep wearing the same four or five necklaces all the time, and/or have to deal with the occasional tangled mess when I was too lazy to open up the shadow box and replace when I had worn. My sister has a teacup hanger/coat rack (similar to this) hanging in her bedroom and she sorts all her necklaces by colour/type. Ingenious, I thought.
A trip to Ikea led me to these lovely Grundtal rails. The fine folks at Ikea have them in their kitchen section, but also use them throughout their catalog/show room as an organizational tool. I scored 3 of them, along with some hooks.
The door to our master bedroom opens to a wall on the left. This is where I decided to hang the rails. After spacing, leveling, and marking my holes, I predrilled and then secured them to the wall using screws. This is the finished product:

I can easily arrange my necklaces according to attribute, and I don't spend valuable time in the morning trying to untie knots from tangled necklaces.

Of course, now that I have the room to expand my beading operation, I don't have the time to devote to it. I guess the beads will collect some dust for now. :o/

Anyone have a solution for sorting and maintaining a working bead collection?