Well, if you’d told me a couple of months ago that I’d be writing this blog, I really wouldn’t have believed you! Apologies for the lack of communication both on here and on my Facebook page recently, but my life has become incredibly busy and full of exciting events all of a sudden.
I had a brilliant time at the Beads Up North Festival on 27th July. I met some lovely ladies at both my workshops and they made beautiful projects. I’m hoping I will be receiving news of some finished Dahlia Beaded Beads – everyone made a good start on their flowers in the workshop, but I knew it was going to be one of those projects that is to be finished off at home! I then managed to befuddle some brains in the second workshop as we tried out making beaded beads using Triangular Right Angle Weave. I’m happy to report that everyone left the workshop with a finished bead strung onto a bracelet, but I did hear that one lady fears she won’t be friends with Right Angle Weave for a while yet! Hopefully that is a friendship that will blossom in time…Right Angle Weave is a fickle stitch that some people find hard to get to know, but once you have befriended it, it certainly creates lovely work!
Four days later, I found myself in Gerrards Cross teaching my first ever course at the Summerschool there. I was teaching my French beaded oxeye daisy project to a lovely group of eleven ladies who were being introduced to French Beading for the first time. We had a lot of fun and I think everyone left the class with at least one flower to take home. You can see everyone hard at work in the photo. Unfortunately I realised after I’d got home that I hadn’t managed to take photos of the results of any of these workshops! Gerrards Cross summerschool has a reputation for being a great experience – I kept hearing about the wonderful food before I went along to teach there. Well, I can report back that it did indeed live up to expectations. The organisers are all volunteers and they do a wonderful job. I know they are already hard at work making plans for next year’s event because I have been invited to return for a couple of workshops. Keep your eyes peeled though because workshops for this prestigious event usually sell out within a day of being announced, so if you want more information, check their website.
I now have a couple of announcements to make – one I’ve been planning for a while and one completely unexpected piece of news. About a year ago I started making plans for a second website. I remember how I felt in my early days of beading. Granted, this was before there was so much information available online, but even so, I still remember the confusion I felt when faced with bead sizes, bead finishes, never mind the findings…I mean, I thought calottes were trousers (although the different spelling was a little confusing!). It also took me time to find out about beading shows, classes and the whole community. Some of that is a lot more obvious these days, but some of it can still be hard to track down. Every class I teach I have a new experience in explaining things, whether it’s finding the best way to teach a technique, or just de-mystifying some of the terminology, or perhaps recommending good beading shops and suppliers. I thought it would be great to have all of this information in one place for reference, so that’s what I’ve been working on doing, slowly! It’s taken a while to get enough information on the site for it to feel like it’s worth sharing. I’m getting there, but you will see there are still a lot of empty pages and I know I have a very long list of things to write about, so it will gradually grow. It seemed like this was a good time to let you all know that the website is in existence though, so do pop across and take a look at ‘My World of Beads‘.
The second big announcement is totally unexpected…I have just been appointed as the new editor of Bead Magazine. I will be working freelance, alongside my existing work, so I’m going to become a lot busier (I have done already!) and I’m going to have to take care to organise myself well so that I don’t end up back in an ME meltdown, but the team at Bead have been very supportive and I’m thrilled to have this opportunity. My first issue will be appearing in October – the Winter Sparkle issue – so wish me luck!
