Well, as forecast, I’ve been busy beading! Unfortunately the majority of my planned 35 or so beaded beads for my battle piece remain unfinished (well actually, mostly un-started!). Some of my fellow battlers are posting that their pieces are finished already! Ok, so we still have a month left to go, but as my piece grows, I’m beginning to consider part two of the challenge…taking photos that will do it justice. I think this may prove to be an even bigger challenge than the beading, so I don’t want to be in a rush to do this at the end. Most challenging of all is trying to work out how on earth to convey enough information about my piece for it to survive round 1, through just 4 photos! Wish me luck…well, first I have to finish it actually, so perhaps best to focus on that for the time being.
So, the reason I haven’t been doing much battle this past couple of weeks is twofold. I had a rush wedding order for a bride who will be getting married in Greece in May. Yes, beaded flowers are perfect for such an occasion – no wilting in the heat and I imagine somewhat easier to transport on a plane than fresh flowers! Plus the colour theme of cream and gold is perfect for beaded flowers. It’s not the first cream and gold bouquet I’ve done, but I am very pleased with the results and the flowers are winging their way to the bride as I write, so I’m not going to share any photos here as it doesn’t seem very fair to let the whole world see the bouquet before the bride (although she has seen photos)! Secondly, I’ve just published my third book. More accurately, it is a second edition of my first book, the miniature beaded cakes. It includes an extra recipe, brand new photos and I had a re-think and edited some of the text. Most importantly it now also has an ISBN, so that makes it kind of official. I hadn’t quite been expecting it to come out just yet. I’ve been working on it for a few months with Vivebooks, but as ever with these things, work can be a bit sporadic. All of a sudden I found myself doing the final proofs and bingo, the download went live last week and I now have copies of the CD-Rom version to sell. I’m really pleased with the results. Being another e-book, this also includes video of me demonstrating the techniques and it was interesting to look back on this with fresh eyes. I’m also really pleased with the ability to flick easily between chapters since I structured the book in sections showing how to make cakes stage by stage, with specific recipes at the back. In physical book form, this meant a lot of flicking between chapters which isn’t always easy, so I’ve just discovered another advantage to the e-book format. It certainly gives me more flexibility as a writer in making something that is user-friendly, but structured in such a way that I can avoid repeating myself too much and keep a section of techniques separate from projects. These are all lessons that I’ll be taking forward to my next big project…top secret for now, but I will be announcing details soon I hope!
This brings me neatly to my final thoughts. Today is exactly one year since my last day of official employment for someone else. I can’t quite believe that I have now been doing the beading as a way of life for a whole year. In some ways it seems like it could have been forever, but in other ways it hardly seems like yesterday. So I’ve been thinking about everything that has happened over the last year. It’s been hugely eventful and hugely enjoyable and I’m not sure that I quite expected to achieve so much to be honest. So I wanted to thank all of you for your support, for the kind words and basically for making this possible. I’ve got lots of plans, more ideas than I will ever manage to bead (probably!) and my new life remains just as exciting as it did a year ago. It has also had a massively positive impact on my health, so today I’m going to be quietly celebrating the last twelve months as I return to my Battle beads and plans for the next twelve months! Thank you everyone.
