Prayer Beads

The winter has brought back the craft days at Paula’s house (where I learned to knit last year). She ran a little class on prayer beads, their history, their uses, various ways to make them. She provided the book Pagan Prayer Beads: Magic and Meditation with Pagan Rosaries by John Michael Greer and Clare Vaughn and opened up her crafting cabinets to us.
Most of us also brought our own beads. I had hit JoAnn’s the night before and even managed to hit a bead sale, buy one strand get one free. Most of the folks went with an elemental theme, I went with a moon theme. I brought two strands of unakite spherical beads and a strand of howlite disk beads. My plan was to use the howlite to mark the full moons and the unakite as a bead for each week between the moons. And after stringing them all, discovered that I had miscounted and was two unakite beads short. We searched all the bead bags, but no more unakite. So I thought of using a different bead and adding new moons. Paula came to my rescue, finding small howlite spherical beads which worked perfectly with my full moon disks. Fifty-two beads make my strand, a measuring of time.