About Us

I am a bead nut. I live along the Wasatch Front in Utah with my jazz guitarist husband, Rich, and our seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily Hye Soo. Rich is a very busy hard working New England musician whose potpourri approach to earning a living in music has paid off. Lily Hye Soo is our youngest daughter. She is a senior in high school, an actress, and is planning for college next year. We have an older daughter, Georgia Cranston. She’s a massage therapist, and is married to a great computer geek named Chad. They have three baby boys which of course makes us the proud grandparents of Kayden, Jett, and Kael. The grandkids keep everybody (but mostly their mother) hopping wildly!

My Bead Beginnings
My first memories of beading began with my mother, Neva Brimhall. She’s the creative sort and always made all kinds of things with her hands. There was nothing she couldn’t create. She was always very interested in jewelry and could put together earrings, necklaces, broaches and rings. She would teach the ladies at church how to make them. When I was a teenager I remember her bedroom tie rack heavily weighted with what I thought was hundreds of beaded necklaces and old Native American jewelry pieces. I still have parts and pieces of some of the necklaces that she made for me. She loved jewelry, and it must have rubbed off on me.

When I was seventeen I started stringing necklaces out of abalone and seashells that washed up on the beaches in my home town of Ventura, California. I thought seashells were about the most beautiful creations God had ever made. Later I adorned myself in organic-dried creations strung with yellow June corn, red berries and small, spikey chili peppers. In college my girlfriends and I would gather juniper berries under the fragrant green scrubby trees of Utah. We would string necklaces with them and enjoy imagining how the Native American Indians made their own “ghost bead” necklaces. I wore earrings made of porcupine quills and was obsessed with Indian turquoise and silver. I sometimes wore my girlfriend Millie’s traditional beaded buckskin dress and I was completely impressed with the colorful beadwork. Many years ago I took a trip deep into Mexico and was touched by an old Huichol Indian woman who would have done anything to sell me some of her hand crafted clay bead necklaces. She was trying to support her children with her bead sales. I still treasure these simple beads in my collection.

Bead Fever
In my late 30’s my mother took my sisters and me to her favorite bead store in Arizona. At that point we all kind of went “nuts” with beads. My husband Rich encouraged me and participated in the bead collecting and before we knew it Rich, my sister Karen Gordon (who also got bead fever – see Bead Bonkers) and I had spent hundreds of dollars on beads of every kind. Karen, my daughters Georgia, Hye Soo and I would stay up late at night stringing up our latest creations. We had a lot of fun. Sometimes my older sister Cindi Henrie and my mother would join us. Even my brother and father joined in on the fun once or twice! We would stay up all night teaching out of town visitors how to craft polymer clay fimo beads. We would take our bead entourage with us on extended family camping trips and bead with my daughters and nieces. I’ll never forget when I tried to slide my bead boxes down the steep brown slick rock that drops down into the Upper-lower Calf Creek wilderness off Boulder Highway in Southern Utah. I was emphatic with Rich that he not let them slip off the cliff!! We had a giant bead-fest with the whole extended family under a giant red rock overhang that rests in the cliffs a few yards upstream of Upper-lower Calf Creek’s waterfall drop off. Everyone made themselves rainbow colored white heart bracelets and necklaces. Before we left we mischievously scattered some red and yellow-orange glass white hearts in the sand hoping the beads would catch the eye of other adventurers who would later visit the overhang and swim in the water potholes. I know for a fact that up to ten years later others have indeed spotted these tiny glass flecks of color glimmering in the fine red sand.

African Trade Beads
In those days I spent quite a bit of time selling my beaded jewelry in shops and boutiques to support my bead buying. The old African trade beads especially interested me and they were Rich’s favorites. My sister Cindi introduced us to Cloyd Sorenson of Utah; he’s a world renowned trade bead expert and owns an extensive collection of beads and artifacts that have been published in the famous July 1971 issue of Arizona Highways. Rich, my sisters and I have visited with Cloyd on several occasions and he has shown us some of his private bead collection and Native American artifacts. He told us stories of his younger day adventures in the Southwest and shared many interesting facts and histories about our own old trade beads we had collected.

Bead Fever Strikes Again
After a few years my “bead fever” took somewhat of a rest. There doesn’t seem to be enough time in one life for everything all at once so the beads took the backseat. I was busy raising my two girls, being Rich’s wife, and co-running a business. I eventually went back to school and became a therapeutic licensed massage therapist. For several years I’ve pursued and am pursuing my interests in bodywork and body/mind related therapies… the healing arts. But!!... my bead passion has resurrected itself. In 2005 Rich purchased several strands of old trade beads and his enthusiasm for the old beads caught fire with me again. Thanks to my sister Karen’s tutoring, graphic design talent, and a million hours spent, Rich and I now have a website and an eBay store. So we welcome you to Dixon’s Trade Bead on the web. Feel free to browse our eBay store auctions and Buy it Now listings. Bead trading and selling is something that we love to do! We look forward to bringing you unique beads and grouping of “the old and the new” in trade beads. We have chosen them carefully and we’ll be bringing you these beads from all around the world.

Happy Beading!!!!!! ~Susan and Rich Dixon