Candy-like handmade glass beads in Walt and Pat Francis' store south of Madras. Most of those pictured were imported from the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

MADRAS – His hands shake noticeably when he is anywhere other than his shop.

As soon as he lights his torch though, ”it quits,” says Walt Francis, 65.

”I got arthritis now and a few other things – who knows what,” he says.

The bead maker and his wife, jewelry maker Pat Francis, are in their 11th year of business south of the Madras city limits on U.S. Highway 97.

They don’t do trade shows and they don’t hawk their wares online. Mostly they sit quietly in their store called Old Hat Glass Beads, and make things.

”We’re the only bead makers that are stationary,” says Pat Francis, 62.

When the sun shines into the building’s wraparound windows, she turns on fans so the glass-beaded curtains she designed will wave and glitter, and attract attention.

Artist Betty Devine discovered the shop almost a decade ago when her husband had a business conference in Sunriver. Devine, whose jewelry shows regularly at galleries in her native Minnesota, saw the words ”dichroic glass beads” outside the Francis’s store and thought it was a mirage.

She has traveled back to Central Oregon to visit the store several times since.

”They have something unique,” she says of Walt Francis’s beads. Devine has made and sold a number of pieces from beads she has bought there.

”But I’ve kept some to wear myself. I like them so much,” she says.

Word of mouth, and little else, has kept the store afloat.

”We’re computer illiterates,” says Pat Francis about their lack of a Web site. She advertises in Lapidary Journal, but otherwise, the couple is isolated from the greater bead-making universe.

Jewelry makers do, however, learn about Walt’s beads, and they sometimes travel hundreds of miles to get them at the store.

One by one, the mustachioed glass blower twirls and pulls on small pieces of molten glass with tools he has made himself.

It is delicate, intense work.

Walt Francis starts with sheets of the dichroic material – a product of NASA aerospace engineering – as well as colored glass rods from Venice, Italy, world headquarters for glass artists.

Add light to his beads, some of which envelop a mushroom-like shape, or are stippled with color, or striped with the reflective metals, and the pieces, Pat Francis boasts, come alive.

The couple sells a range of imported beads that start in price at less than a dollar. Walt Francis’s handcrafted pieces start at around $6; his more elaborate pieces sell for $20 to $30.

High on the store’s back wall, a worn and dirty Stetson rests on a nail, far from the shimmering merchandise below.

The hat represents a life the couple gave up, one that had them wandering, looking for bits of wood and bone and rock in the Central Oregon desert. The found objects made their way into extravagant plant and flower arrangements the couple used to make and sell. An orange cargo van outside their store has 450,000 miles clocked on it – testimony to the extensive traveling required in that line of work.

The labor, including the work of growing the plants, began to take its toll.

”We were going over the mountain two to three times a week,” says Pat Francis of their trips to markets in Portland and Seattle. ”We weren’t getting any younger.”

They bought a torch – the kind used on Pyrex for science-related glass – and Walt set about teaching himself the art of bead making.

”Once he sat down with that torch,” says Pat Francis, ”he just never got back up. So we decided glass was gonna be it.”

They leased the store, which had once been a Jeep dealership and most recently an auto body shop.

They took it for the 14-foot ceilings and the tall glass windows that look south and west. But it was a mess.

”The bay doors were hanging all cattywampus,” says Walt Francis. ”It needed work.”

Many of the couple’s first visitors weren’t customers but curious residents of Prineville and Madras.

”They came just to check it out,” says Walt Francis.

Some read the sign that said ”Glass Bead Maker” on the front of the building, and became confused. ”They came in here wanting to buy a glass bead maker,” says Pat Francis. ”I said, ‘OK, but you’ll have to feed him.’”

The store is no longer such an oddity in the town, according to the couple. Artists are few and far between in Madras, says Pat Francis, but that might change along with the area’s demographics.

She says she would like to see more of a community among those who devote their lives to aesthetic endeavors.

”But this is a town that’s had a real hard time changing,” she says.

Bead making – especially in the absence of a Web site – is not highly profitable, the couple admits.

”But we like what we’re doing,” says Walt Francis. ”It’s not stressful.”