Review - Firemountain Gem, Online shopping

I have purchased beads a couple of times from online and in bead shows. There is this one website I discovered called "firemountain gems" (website here). At first glance, I felt a bit iffy about this website, due to the font and the full page of different choices. After reviewing this website for a while, and reading it on a beading magazine, I decided to take a risk and try it out.

Undoubtedly, firemountain has LOTS of choices, from beads, tools, to findings, and wire. There are navigation bars on the left, with many choices, such as beads, jewelry supplies, stringing materials, wires, and other special items. They also have search bar on the left that will sort out prices for you. If you were looking for beads around $1-5 dollars, you can sort that way and be very easy to make some general choices.

The website pricing is fairly reasonable, and sometimes cheaper than other website. But what comes with this, is a little sacrifice of the quality. I find that sometimes the stones were not as well kept and polished as other websites like limabeads.com.

I have purchased this beading wire from firemountain called zebra wire which I don't recommend. I chose these because it was fairly cheap and I was going to use them to do some practice wrapping before using sterling silver. But once I received it, I find the wire is very slippery and harder to shape. Maybe it was the nature of the coating on top of the copper wire.

I usually make my jewelry from natural semi-precious stones. I find this website is easy to navigate through, and I was especially impressed by the selections. However, the way they cut their briolettes seems different than some of the other popular beading websites. For example, in my previous post, I used Carnelian stone from this website (mentioned here). I find that I prefer more of a oval shape briolette than a cylinder shape. See below I made two similar chandelier earrings.

To make a summary of the review of this website, I would recommend to someone who is just starting jewelry making, mainly for the bargain price and wide selection of beads and colors, they also have base metal wire and findings that makes the price a little cheaper than precious metals like sterling silver and gold. However, I do think that one should try out other websites to find their own preferred website. Firemountain gems seems to have everything basic to start your jewelry making. They calculate the shipping once you add everything to cart and are ready to check out. The shipping charge for me is usually no more than $5.00 which is not bad. I have seen other websites charing $9+ for shipping.

Readers, what's your favorite beading website?