Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Shopping for Beads on Queen Street West

There’s an area in Toronto, on Queen Street West just west of Spadina, that is a crafty person’s dream come true. I’ve previously done a post about finding buttons (here), fabric (here) and ribbons (here), and today I will tell you about the bead shops. Oh, the wonderful bead shops!

Anything you could possibly want to make jewellery can be found in the several stores, all located really close to one another. They’re so close, that you can easily check them all out, in order to determine which ones has exactly what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, surely you’ll find something that you’ll want. The choice is pretty well without limit.

The prices in the area seem to be very good to me, although I might not be the best person to give an opinion on that, because I’ve only ever looked for beads in these stores. I’ve never really seen a need to look anywhere else.

When I went last week to find beads for a project I’m working on I brought my camera along and asked permission to take some photos, to show you the goods. They’re not listed in any particular order, based on preference because they’re all good. I’d recommend checking them each out.

Here’s Bling Bling, located at 448 Queen Street West, on the north east side of Augusta.

You’ll notice that there is another one right beside it called The Beadery. I missed going into that store, but I’ll try to get there sometime soon and I’ll update this post after I’ve been. I notice on their website that they give one-on-one jewellery making classes. Update : The Beadery has moved a bit westward, near Queen West and Portland Street.

Directly across the street, at 525 Queen West, is Arton Beads. They actually have two stores side-by-side, but I usually only go into the one to the west, and that’s where these shots were taken :

Update : Arton gave up one of the stores and kept the other one. They also have an online shop.

( NOTE that Arton is closed on Sundays. )

Then, a little further to the west, across Augusta you’ll find a lovely shop called Hi Beads :

So now, if you live in Toronto and ever feel the need to bead, you know where to go. And if you don’t live here or prefer to buy your jewellery already assembled, hopefully it was interesting to see what the inside of a bead store looks like.

And this is what I picked up. I’ll show you what I made in my next post.