Library display is 'batty about beads'

Leart Jett admits to being "batty about beads."

Throughout November, Jett and Tammy Haynes will have their art pieces on display in the glass cabinets in the foyer of the Sisters Library, as part of the Friends of the Sisters Library (FOSL) monthly art exhibit.

While Haynes has been doing the beading art for a little over six years, Jett started when she was 8 years old, working with her grandmother's old bead collection.

Tammy works with metal and beads, gaining great pleasure in what she describes as "washers, half-washers, copper wire and beads," while Leart prefers to work with older heirloom beads she acquires and recycles from a wide variety of family jewelry she finds in her travels to the Southwest.

"One of the first places I go looking for old beads (is) garage sales, thrift stores and other locations where discarded family jewelry can be found," she says.

She then uses what she buys (including small ivory beads) to create her own colorful beading pieces. Leart's favorite saying is: "Life's too short to wear boring jewelry."

Anyone entering the studio where she unleashes what she describes as her "fickle creative processes" can't help but notice the assortment of toy bats hanging over her workbench - all adorned in beautiful beaded necklaces.

Tammy Haynes' favorite area of beading is doing metal and bead brooches that make scarves of all colors and design come alive.

Way back in Roman times, when the toga and scarves were the rage, the fibula (brooch) was used to tie everything together.

The same word denotes the fibula bone

- or calf bone, located below the knee on the lateral side of the tibia; it is the smaller of the two bones, and, in proportion to its length, the most slender of all the long leg-bones. Because the popular form for brooches and the shape of the bone were thought to resemble one another, the name fibula has stuck through the ages.

Their descendant - the modern safety pin - remains in use today.

Tammy's part of the FOSL art exhibit is the result of her love of working metal, wire and beads into a variety of art pieces.

Asked how she comes up with her unique metal and beading commissions and other art pieces, Tammy says, "Oh, I just sit here and plunk, looking at my washers, wire, and the bazillion beads I have; and gradually, what I see inside my head is sitting there on my work bench."