There's a right way, and a wrong way...

To make bead soup.

I used to keep my leftover beads in small plastic tubs, obsessively sorted by color. Since I am more of a bead weaver than a bead stringer, most of my leftover beads are seed beads.

I liked these tubs because they were a nice size, no taking up too much space on my workbench, and they stacked, each one nesting in the one below it. They were very stable when stacked, which was a good thing, since they didn't have lids. And lids would have made the whole system less attractive and functional for me, anyway, since I would have had to open the lids everytime I need to access one of the soups, and the stack of tubs would have been over 15 inches tall! Ridiculous!

But then came the day when we needed to move the stacked tubs of seed beads to the back room, for some reason. Who can remember these details now? All I know is that my assistant was carrying them, and the next thing I heard was a really loud "Shit!!!!" from the back room, and I walked back there to find this:

That black shoe belongs to the bead-dropper.

We spent the rest of the day resorting all the beads, because I have a touch of OCD, and I just couldn't have the colors mingling .... ewwww.  And then we weighed out the colors and packaged them in sealed ziploc bags and sold them as bead soup!

And I do not let the leftover beads build up like this anymore.