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Lalibella Blu is a promotion of Garan-Beadagio and Anna Kathleen Johnson. Since she was a child, Anna has loved the association of nature and art, and the integration of visual line, natural shape, and sinuous movement with the rhythms of life. Her grandmother, Anna Mary Hill, taught her to sew clothes, embroider, string beads, and to appreciate continuity of design in elegance and form. As a young woman, through travels, research, and many bohemian-artistic friendships, Anna developed expertise in the rarest antique and vintage beads. She was fascinated with glass bead making in Reichenbach, Jablonec nad Nisou, Providence, Murano, and Kaufbeuren-Neugablonz. In the late sixties, Anna began redesigning vintage and antique clothing and jewelry and selling them to shops on Melrose Avenue. She searched for rare kilims, lace, tapestries, embroideries, and fabrics at flea markets, old bead, button, and glasswork warehouses, wholesale textile markets, silk merchants, and millinery houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Providence. After forty years in the wholesale bead business, Anna wanted to produce a show that mirrored the relationship of nature and art, and the way they are lovingly interlaced in colors, textures, and patterns at the deepest levels of the mind. She named her first show To Bead True Blue. It was a six-day show concurrent with the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. It was structured as a resurgent Arts and Crafts show, the output of many diverse cultures and traditions, and it was successful beyond her most optimistic expectations, growing from fifty to five hundred exhibitors in four years, and becoming the major show of its kind in the United States.(Also see: To Bead True Blue; Contact Us; Register to Attend)
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