How to store your bead necklaces

Often bead necklaces are hanged on walls of bedroom or bathroom or otherwise used as decoration on bottles, mirrors or even chandeliers. Nice to see but bad for the beads. This practice of hanging stretches the necklaces and even the best beading threads will suffer over time, not to mention the amount of dust they catch. Only if a bead necklace is strung too stiff you can hang it away some time in an effort to make it a little more supple.

Store your necklaces in a closed place like a drawer or a shoebox. Long necklaces you can put away in a shoebox for boots. Often you can get them for free at a shoe shop. Of course, there is no objection at all to use a beautiful jewelry box, but in most cases these boxes are too small for the longer and more voluminous bead necklaces. Another solution is the use of the drawers of a closed plastic office box for A4 size paper. These boxes are very compact and quite expensive but can contain a lot of necklaces on condition the beads are not too bulky. Store the necklaces by color for convenience when choosing and you can write the color on the drawer at the outside.

If your bead necklaces are quite valuable (to you), the best method is putting them on a piece of rectangular cloth, like soft velvet, and rolling the cloth around them one by one so each necklace is completely embedded in the velvet. This is especially important if the beads are made of scratch susceptible materials like some plastics, amber, jet, ivory, aluminum and last but not least pearls, real and imitation pearls alike. This is the official way of storing expensive fine jewelry, and beautiful jewelry bags based on this idea are being sold. They are quite expensive, but you can make them by yourself.

Do not store your bead necklaces in the vicinity of radiators or other hot environments like intense sunshine through the window, as heat can dry out or crack materials like pearls and mother of pearl, which contain about 10 percent of water, and beads made of tortoise shell, ivory, coral and the (rare) beads of opals which contain about 10-20 percent of water.

Nowadays a lot of bead necklaces are being strung on so called "tiger tail". This is nylon coated stranded stainless steel jewelry stringing wire, a kind of clothes-line for jewelry purposes. It is very strong but kinks easily and the kink is permanent. So always put these necklaces down with utmost care in the right form.

Necklaces with a fish-hook clasp should be stored closed and not open in your jewelry box. When open, the hooks of these necklaces can be (indeed) hooked up on your other jewelry while taking the necklace out of the box and can make a mess of the other treasures there and even damage them.

Necklaces which has to be closed in one specific way, like bead necklaces made of multiple strands or made of different elements which have a good side and a wrong side, should be stored with their clasps closed as well in the right way. It makes it much easier for you to put them on another time.