Our new Tex 400 C-Lon® bead cord is now in stock. It's a nice heavyweight 0.8mm stringing cord which can also be used for micro macrame. 75 lb breaking strength should guarantee long-lasting creations. We're starting with 16 colors and will add more if there are requests.



Our ad for the 4th Mmmm... Miyuki Contest is on page 29 of the new Beadwork Magazine. We've been short-staffed and extremely busy the past few weeks so as usual I have procrastinated and do not yet have the rules posted. I'll try to have them up by this weekend.

We're expecting an air shipment of Delicas in the near future. That shipment also includes the latest Miyuki kits. They're listed on the shopping cart; let us know if you want any reserved.

Speaking of which, please note that the shopping cart Wait List is not a reservation system. When you add an item to the Wait List, it means you will get an email as soon as it is in stock. However it does not reserve or pre-order the items. If we know an item is on an inbound shipment we are happy to preorder it for you. In general this is not necessary because we bring in more than enough (usually 25- 100 kgs per color for non-Delica beads). But for items like kits, and new beads like the 15/0 Delicas which are very slow to produce, asking us to reserve some for you before they arrive is a good idea.

Our April sea shipment has arrived. We will be unpacking it tomorrow so will only process urgent next day and 2-day orders tomorrow. We should resume normal shipping on Friday. This shipment includes a boat load (sorry, the pun was irresistable!) of new 15/0s and 15/0 hex cuts. The full shipment list is here.

We have a limited selection of the new 15/0 Delicas left. I'll post a note when we have information about receiving more.

The precision cut 15/0 Delicas arrived on Thursday afternoon. Miyuki sent them in 500 gram bags so we're still working on repackaging. That should be done this weekend and on Monday we will start to ship.

Important: I haven't had time to look at all the orders, but I'm 99% certain that we now have a lot more orders* for the 15/0 Delicas than we have stock. We're already talking to Miyuki about getting more as soon as possible. We'll fill orders in sequence and when we run out, we'll turn the remaining orders into preorders and let you know when we expect to fill them.

*Some of the orders came in earlier by email or fax, and since we haven't processed them yet, the shopping cart doesn't know that those beads are already reserved. By Monday it'll be accurate again, but in the meantime it will continue to show beads available which in fact are not—sorry!

Lots of shipments coming. Our April sea shipment is due in at the end of this month or early in May. A list of the contents is here.

An air shipment is due in shortly which contains lots of Miyuki kits and new 15/0 Delicas. Most of the 15/0 Delicas are already pre-ordered so for now these will be in short supply.

Miyuki is currently packing another air shipment for us which should arrive in a couple of weeks, and they're also working on our next sea shipment which will arrive at the end of May or in early June.

We have ordered some new Miyuki kits and will have those listed on the shopping cart next week. Here's one of the bracelets:

Starting later today, we will be offering half packs of all 4,000+ Miyuki beads in our inventory. So 250 grams packs will be available in 125 gram half packs, etc. Note that there will be a surcharge to cover our cost for bags, labor, and labels, and for the next few weeks or so as we start repackaging, please assume that orders which include half packs will take an extra day or two to process.

This service should be particularly helpful to established bead stores wanting to expand their selection of Miyuki beads while keeping initial costs down, and to new bead stores investing in startup inventory.

We will also offer occasional special package deals. I'm thinking in particular of collections of new Miyuki beads that come in which will be available as a set of half packs. Details as we make final decisions.

Speaking of new beads, the remaining new Delica colors should arrive on Thursday along with lots of out of stock Miyuki kits.

Mmmm...Miyuki! Contest no. 1 is over. Photos and more info on the Contest 1 page.

Busy! If I were a juggler, I'd have colored balls, plates, pins, scarves, and the kitchen sink in the air. Maybe with a blindfold on.

We are unpacking the March sea shipment from Miyuki. Hoping to finish by the end of the day, so today we'll only be shipping out overnight and 2-day orders. Should be back to regular shipping on Monday.

There's a new color of C-Lon bead cord available, CLC-M Mint. It will replace the Mint Julep color. The new Mint is a softer green and we prefer it. The Mint Julep is marked down while it lasts.

With the help of the Miyuki design department and the Caravan staff, we have finished judging the first Mmmm....Miyuki! contest. All I can say is, it's hard to choose! I will be emailing the winners this weekend and hopefully will have time to prepare images for the website so you can see some pretty beadwork.

Eight of the new 11/0 Delicas arrived a couple of days ago and we should have the remaining 55 colors available in a couple of weeks.

A long while back we asked Miyuki if they could produce smaller Delicas. After many months of work, they told us that it was possible and we placed an order. These new 15/0 precision-cut Delicas (DBS) are now in production with an initial run of 127 colors. We don't have a delivery date yet—like regular 15/0s, these are slow to produce—but all the colors are now listed on our wholesale shopping cart. If you'd like to reserve some or all of them, please send us an email or add the ones you'd like to the Wait List. As soon as we have some delivery information, I'll post it here.

And speaking of delivery, the 63 new colors of 11/0 Delicas should be shipping to us at the end of this month.

Eight new colors of C-Lon Micro Cord will arrive Friday. There's a listing of the colors here. And more colors coming in the not-too-distant future.

No other news for today, other than the slush that is falling from the sky and coating Portland. What a mess! C'mon, springtime!

Delica Beaded Jewelry is a new book by Alice Korach, the founding editor of Bead and Button magazine. It features some lovely projects, all using 10/0 Delicas. The retail price is $14.99 and we have discounted pricing for wholesale customers and bead stores. Lots of photos and very detailed instructions. It's now available on our shopping cart.

Here's a scan showing the projects:

Oooh, there are some really nice new beads in the sea shipment. Seeing them on a sample card is never as nice as holding a 250 gram bag in your hand. The new fancy magatamas in particular, as well as new 8/0s, have the Caravan crowd very excited. We're almost finished unpacking the sea freight and will get some photos up as soon as time permits.

Wait List emails for this shipment will go out shortly.

Our February sea shipment from Miyuki arrived late Friday afternoon. We'll be unpacking it Monday and probably part of Tuesday, and then we'll resume regular shipping.

Snow, snow, and more snow. It's a white Maine winter.

We have an air shipment from Miyuki due to arrive Monday or Tuesday. It includes two new sample cards: one is for new beads that arrived in December and January and additional ones that will be arriving this month and later in the year, and the other card shows the 63 new colors of Delicas that Miyuki is currently producing. The item numbers are: Card-2008-1 and Delica.Card 843.

Starting today, wholesale customers can purchase half-packs (4 bobbins) of C-Lon Bead Cord and Micro cord.

This info vanished during one of our website upgrades, so here 'tis again:

Abbreviations in our bead descriptions

AB = aurora borealis (rainbow)
Galv = galvanized
Lt = light
Met = metallic
OP = opaque
S/L = silverlined
SF = semi-frosted
SPKL = sparkling
Tr = transparent
TW = twisted

Letters used in Miyuki item numbers:
D = dark
F = Frosted (matte)
FR = Frosted Rainbow (matte AB)
L = light
R = rainbow (AB)
S = silverlined
S/L = matte silverlined
SF = semi-frosted

The list of items, including new beads, which are coming in our February sea shipment is now available.

We're working on new goodies for 2008, which will include a large expansion of our C-Lon® collection. I'll have more details within the next month or so after we make final color choices.

One of our customers is a large electronics manufacturer. They're doing some research which involves beads, and at their request we recently added 10/0 Delica DBM 741 Matte Crystal to our stock. It's not on the 10/0 sample card, but is now available.

Miyuki's 63 new Delica colors are now pictured on the shopping cart and can be added to your Wait List, or if you'd like to reserve all the colors, please let us know. We don't have a delivery date for them yet, but they are in production.

We're starting to receive entries for the first Mmm....Miyuki! contest--what fun!

Our January Miyuki sea shipment arrived this afternoon and we hope to have it unpacked by the end of the day tomorrow. We'll ship overnight and 2-Day shipments only tomorrow.

Bead Creator 4.0 is scheduled for release in February. Customers who purchase version 3.0 between now and the release of 4.0 will get a free upgrade, and will also save some money as the retail price of 4.0 will be $89.95.

Another day, another ten inches of snow. Portland is having quite the winter!

We're expecting our January sea shipment from Miyuki to arrive Monday or Tuesday.

Information about our 2nd Mmmmm...Miyuki! beading contest are now available. See the link at left.

Happy New Year!

Miyuki just sent us samples of 63 new 11/0 Delicas they plan to produce this year. They are all transparent inside dyed colors. Here are enlarged photos of DB1736, DB1756, and DB1769:







After we recover from the week we just spent taking inventory in our retail store, we'll photograph them, come up with color descriptions (the hardest part), and get them up on the cart so you can add them to your Wait List if you want first dibs.

We now have a list of our next sea shipment from Miyuki. It includes another 30+ new beads. Miyuki has also told me that they have some new products coming out in the first part of 2008. I'll share info as soon as I have more details.

We've been finishing our end of the year inventory count in the warehouse and will start on the retail store in a few more days. I can't believe another year has flown past.

Best wishes for the holidays and the New Year from all of us at Caravan Beads!

Barry

8-410: opaque mauve

Wholesale customers: the 87 new Miyuki beads which arrived in our last sea shipment are now photographed and available on the shopping cart. We don't have them tubed up yet so please give us another week or two if you need smaller quantities.

Also now available to wholesale customers: a 4-card set showing all 64 colors of C-Lon Bead cord. Hand-made in Maine!

Both air and sea shipments from Miyuki arrived yesterday and are mostly unpacked. We'll be updating inventory levels on the cart within the next half hour and will also be sending out notifications for items you've put on the Wait List.

There are quite a few lovely new beads in the sea shipment which are not yet listed on the cart. Time permitting, we'll get those added later this afternoon or first thing tomorrow. Photos will follow in the next week or so as we have time to take them.

We're expecting both air and sea shipments to arrive in the next week or so. One note: if you've been waiting for any of the Miyuki kits, I'm happy (and sad) to say that they are selling far more quickly than we anticipated, and most of the inbound ones are already promised to customers. We're increasing our reorder quantities so hopefully next year we'll get ahead of the curve.

Miyuki is making new sample cards for the new beads that will start arriving with the inbound sea shipment. I don't have a delivery date yet, but they have started to make the first of them.

Speaking of sample cards, we have started to make sets of sample cards for the C-Lon bead cord. This is an astonishingly slow process, but sometime in the next few weeks the first 80 sets should be available. Based on the labor involved, I'm tempted to charge $100 per set (of four cards) but the final price will be much more reasonable. I've also joked that we should sign and number them, like art prints, so that they will be properly admired by their new owners.

We've had a number of inquiries about our Mmmm...Miyuki contest, and we recently sent Beadwork the copy and photo for the next ad and contest. My lips are sealed, but we'll post the information about contest #2 in early January.

And finally, most of the new bead tubes mentioned in our news of 10/8 are now in stock and starting to sell--thanks!

We're expecting both air and sea shipments from Miyuki to arrive in the next week or so. I'll let you know as soon as we have accurate dates. The sea shipment has

We've scheduled two holiday earring classes in our retail store. Dates and times are:

Tues November 27th & Tues December 11th from 6pm - 8pm. Cost is $25 + materials. This is equivalent to our basic earring class but each student will make three pairs of holiday earrings. Here's a sample of the kinds of earrings you could make.

Reservations required: Please call the store at 207-761-2503 x 211 or stop by to register.

Tags: holiday earrings

Every week or two someone asks us when Miyuki's rhodium plated beads will again be available. Here's the story:

Over the past six or seven years, the market price for rhodium has climbed from around $500 per oz to its current level of over $6,000 per oz.

To put it another way, if the price of gas had gone up by the same amount, we would now be paying $20-25 per gallon or more. Ouch!

As the price steadily increased, Miyuki finally reached a point where they could no longer imagine customers buying rhodium-plated beads, and they stopped producing them. They are working on a substitute but so far have not come up with anything satisfactory.

The affected beads are:

In Delicas: 32 & 32cut, 332, 502 & 502 cut, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513. This applies to all sizes of Delicas.

In other beads: color numbers 192 & 200. (From our stock this only applies to SB-192)

DB 38 is a reasonable substitute for DB 32. There are no alternates for 509 - 513.

Our Miyuki air shipment arrived about an hour ago and we've started unpacking it. It includes a first installment of the Miyuki Fan Club kits (dog, panda, etc.) as well as a slew of out-of-stock Delicas. Hope to have the inventory updated in a few hours.

For our beading friends in Sweden, news and information about our Mmm...Miyuki! contest is now available in Swedish at the Zionesse website. Tack so mycket!

We also just received the invoice for our next Miyuki sea shipment which is due in at the end of November. It includes new colors of 11/0s and 8/0s. I'll send out a mailing with details in the next week or so. Good thing we added all that warehouse space!

Forgot to mention that we just received a large shipment from Swarovski. Cart is updated. Pricing is also updated. The bad news is that the prices have gone up due to the steadily weakening dollar vs. the euro. The good news is that Swarovski recently capped the currency surcharge on their beads at 20% through the end of the year. If they hadn't put the cap on, the surcharge would be close to 30% and the prices would have gone up even more. If you had any beads on the Wait List, the new pricing will apply.

Speaking of the contest, our full-page ad for the contest is on page 67 of the new issue of Beadwork Magazine. We had inquiries about it from customers in our own retail store. I'll be curious to see what is created!

It's been a while since we sponsored a contest so I'm happy to announce the first in a series of contests we are sponsoring with Miyuki.

Our next sea shipment is due into Boston any day now, so will hopefully be delivered in the near future.

We have a new limited edition multi-mix for the holidays named Candy Cane:



It's available on the cart. Supplies are limited.


We'll also soon be expanding our tube selection for our bead store and wholesale customers to include many sizes of flip tops, square tubes, etc. We'll be adding them to the cart as stock arrives over the next few weeks. Here's a sampling:



Our next sea shipment from Miyuki is due in at the end of this week.

Last year we hosted a successful fund-raiser for F.I.R.S.T. (the Foundation for Ichthyosis and Related Skin Types). This year we've offered to host another which will be held between 4pm - 7pm on Monday, October 1st, in our retail store. 30% of all sales will be donated to the foundation. Please call retail if you have any questions: 207-761-2503 x211. Thanks!

I've been fooling around with Yahoo pipes and created a bead store finder:

It's limited to what Yahoo local pulls up within a 20 miles radius of the city and state you enter, but it's still kinda fun. Note that it offers either map or list views of the search results.

A few intrepid employees came to work yesterday and we packed up lots of the new Miyuki Xmas kits which will ship out today.

Wow! I knew we'd been busy, but I didn't realize that it had been a month since my last update. We've moved many tons of beads into our new warehouse and more recently have been reorganizing stock in the old warehouse. I haven't felt much need to go to the gym recently with all this weight lifting going on here.

But we're about done, and now can get back to normal business.

We have both air and sea shipments coming from Miyuki in the next 1-2 weeks. I'll let you know as soon as they arrive. The sea shipment includes new matte silverlined 8/0 triangles and four Miyuki Christmas kits. I posted the kits on the shopping cart earlier today along with some other cute animal mini-kits that are on order. Here's Santa:



These little guys are actually about 1.5 inches (4cm) tall. In Japan they are often used as cell phone adornments.

Sea freight delayed Read More...

Air and sea shipments from Miyuki should be arriving next week. We also have a large shipment of Japanese miracle beads coming at the end of June.

Yesterday we received the shipment list for our end-of-July sea shipment from Miyuki. It includes new matte silverlined 10/0 triangles.

Miyuki has been updating their website and it now contains a wealth of useful information in English including sample card images, a description of the manufacturing process, a chart of the various sizes and shapes of beads they make, and lots more.

Class schedule Read More...

Many changes in US postal shipping, especially for international customers Read More...

New cubes and Miyuki kits Read More...

Sea freight due on Monday Read More...

No news yet on our sea freight which was officially due in Boston yesterday. For once I don't mind if it comes a week late. Right now we have no way to get our forklift out to unload the truck. With the slab being poured on Friday, by Monday we will have access to our new overhead door and the delivery truck.

Speaking of beads, I sent Miyuki an initial list of new beads that we are ordering to put in our new warehouse. The list contains about 300 items including 15/0 hex cuts, lots of new 11/0s, 8/0s, 6/0s, cubes, drops, and magatamas. That was only the first of many installments. We're hoping to get 30-50 new items per month starting in August and continuing for many years. (That's why I made the new warehouse so big!)

New mixes by popular demand Read More...

Miyuki sent us some interesting photos of samples they've made using 10/0 Delicas.

New beads etc. Read More...

December sea shipment from Miyuki Read More...

Inbound shipments etc. Read More...

Sample cards for matte silverlined beads are available, more news. Read More...

Coming soon: 10/0 Delicas Read More...

Swarovski updated, some price changes. Read More...

October sea shipment from Miyuki Read More...

New Miyuki beads, C-Lon bead cord, site appearance, training dates. Read More...

Wait list feature is now active. Read More...

We're discontinuing two categories from wholesale. Read More...

Change in packaging, new 9mm Miyuki beads. Read More...