Back off, man. I'm a scientist. (Or at least that's what my resume tells me.)

I own waaay too many beads. In turn, the wombat-consort and I are owned by two cats, who try to help keep the bead population down. Sometimes down the heating vents, which is among the reasons I prefer glass and stone instead of (melty) plastic. As for the whole wombat thing, no, I'm not Australian. It's a long story involving the international barter of fanfic for Vegemite.

Since my two main hobbies are beads and anime/manga (er, three! three main hobbies...), I figured there must be some way to combine them somehow. Voila, and also irasshaimase. Si requiris cosplay, circumspice.

Special requests/commissions are welcome; if you have an idea or a picture, let me know and I'll see what I can do. If you don't hear anything from me about it for a while, I may have flaked out and temporarily forgotten, but payment is only required once I've actually completed the item, sent pix for approval, and set up a Buy It Now listing.

Anyway, back to the whole beadage thing. I like beads. They stay crunchy in milk. In my listings, I try to describe them as fully as possible, sometimes to the point of gratutious infodump which may be only tangentially relevant. One of my pet peeves is the all-too-common use of misleading trade names like "smoky topaz", "new jade", "white buffalo turquoise", and "sea opal" for stuff with little intrinsic similarity to the real materials whose names they're borrowing. (Answers: quartz, serpentine, howlite, and glass.) But at least eBay's search terms give me the subversive pleasure of being able to use those keywords to provide a more complete picture.

There are actually a number of glass-based materials often mistaken for (or misrepresented as) "real" gemstones. In addition to "sea opal", there are also various "quartzes" (strawberry, lavender, pineapple, et al.), fiber-optic catseyes (technicolor), and goldstone (copper and blue are the most common, though there are some others). In some fairness, their cost does get bumped up in that direction, not just because of the specialty processes required to make the stuff in the first place, but also because unlike normal glass items which can be poured or squished as hot liquid from a bulk manufacturing vat, these have to be carved, machined, or otherwise thwacked into shape in solid form, incurring as much labor there as conventional stones.

I use sterling silver findings whenever possible, and maybe even sometimes when it's not. (Now that I've finally tracked down sterling clips for non-pierced ears, I've forgotten what I was planning to do with them... sigh.)  While there are occasional exceptions, I'll always state them clearly.