Class Day

After three weeks of no classes and five weeks of no kits to prepare it's back to the routine of weekly classes tonight. Allbeit with a new format.

It hasn't quite hit me that I don't have a new design and kit to do every week yet, but it's beginning to feel good.

My new format involves a large project, well two really, one for beginners and one for advanced, and so just two kits done for the beginning of the month. It will definitely make some extra time for me, which, of course is already planned away...lol!

It's a small class tonight so far....we'll see if the demo I did last week will bring any new beaders in.  But small is good to get me back into the swing of it. I know it's only three weeks but it's been such a busy three weeks it feels like three months!

Bead Mavens are off and running. That has come together so easily it amazes me and you've never met such a group of agreeable people. Beaders rock!We're planning challenges, throwing components at each other along with jovial barbs.

And...you don't just get to watch us play....you can take part too.

Sunday is question day...so if you have a question you'd like answered by all of us....ask it on our Facebook page and we'll choose the best question each week to answer. Six designer/teachers to answer your bead questions, that should give you a good chance to get an answer you like :)

I'm a Bead Maven :)

Yep the cat is out of the bag, and Bead Mavens are/is launched.

This was an idea Linda L. Jones and I have been tossing around for a while. You meet a lot of beaders through Facebook and some you just click with, it was like that for Linda and I, so talk about working on something together was natural.   With the rebirth of Artfire it seemed like a great time to create something new, so with an Artfire store being the keystone we began looking for our 'gaggle' of beaders.

We had a simple set of qualifications....

They must be a professional beader charging correctly for their hard work and talent, they must teach, they must be pro-active in promoting beadwork....oh, and we had to LOVE what they did :)

Now, while it's very easy to find gorgeous beadwork, the teaching thing slims the numbers down, plus we were looking for relatively new designers/teachers.

Nancy Dale was an instant choice....her work is amazing and as she's just started teaching she was exactly what we were looking for.

Good Quill Hunting was next up....stunning work and a power house of energy and ideas...no brainer!

My next suggestion was Cynthia Newcomer Daniel of Jewelry Tales, someone I've known for a while and whose work I love...it's very light and lacy and she writes the best tutorials.

Linda's suggestion was Peter Sewell of Beadsage. I confess I was not aware of Peter's work but as soon as I took a look ...OMG, yes! So Peter became our token bloke :) and the only one of us not in the US. He's a Brit like me and weirdly enough lives in basically my home town.

So this is our core six.

Will there be more Mavens? Yes, we do look to increase our numbers once we have everything in place and get comfortable with it.

The dream/goal is to be able to have Bead Maven workshops and retreats all over the US and, obviously England and maybe the world....lol, dream big!

 A bead calendar with a project a month will be first up, a collaborative book will hopefullly be next and who knows what else we will think of.

As teachers we all want to spread the joy and knowledge of beading and we feel this is a great way to do it.

On other fronts....did everyone catch the amazing giveaway from Carol Dean Sharpe?  She's actually going to giveaway her fabulously creative new bead.

Go to her blog and make a comment to enter to win this beauty.

And that's all for now.

But do stop on by the Bead Mavens blog where Wednesday is Nancy Dale Day!

Focus

Such a little word and yet, often so hard to achieve.

Sometimes it's because there's so much going on outside your bead world and sometimes it's because there's so much going on inside your bead world.

It's hard to focus when you have to cook dinner, there's shopping, laundry, dishes, gardening etc to be done. So many times when you sit down to bead the brain is saying "I should be doing........"

It's just as hard to focus when the outside stuff is done and you have a zillion ideas swimming around in your brain shouting "Me first!"

And then there are the times when all the work is done, you can sit quietly and create...the focus is there but you can hear the crickets chirping in your brain.

When the alignment of focus and creativity happens things are easy.

Tutorials flow quickly, bead paths become highlighted, designs morph on their own and you can hear your muse sighing happily.

Don't we all wish for days like that? Weeks like that? Months...ok, now I'm being greedy.

I wish I could tell you how to make the alignment happen but it's an enigma. All I can say is if you have a day of alignment use it for all it's worth, you may get a week's worth of work done in that day.

I had a good one yesterday and finally finished the tutorials that had been giving me a hard time....they just wanted to come out slowly...you know like a really long, arduous birth. Sometimes I have a tutorial written and illustrated in a morning, so fast I have to go through it six times to check it because I don't believe it could possibly be correct in such a short time.  But, that's an alignment day for you.

We're having real Fall weather here, lots of rain and cool temperatures, it's good focusing weather :)  So, I'll be making hay today.

I'm wishing you all a great day of alignment!

The Best Thing About Beaders

I don't think there's a day goes by that I'm not impressed by beaders.

What impresses me? The creativity, the range, the colors...yep, all of those but mostly it's their generosity and camaraderie.

I've always been a generous person myself (too generous my family would say) and I have to say it's rarely worked out well for me. I've had things I was giving to charity stolen, had loaned things not returned and a couple of years ago I loaned a full costume (which I had made) including shoes to a supposed friend from work who not only didn't return them.....hung up on me every time I phoned to ask her about my picking them up and threatened me in the end.  It very much leaves you thinking "people suck".

So, it is amazingly refreshing that beaders are so generous with their time, support, advice, resources, and even beads.  You see a lot of 'Pay It Forward' in the bead world and that just heartens my spirit.

One fabulous thing that has just been started by Carol Dean Sharpe is "The Best Little Bead Box" which she designed to raise funds for the "Beads of Courage" charity.   When I won the glass category of Beadstar 2009 we had the option of donating our pieces for an auction to benefit Breast Cancer and I was thrilled to do that.

In other news, I'm part of a new group being formed and it is very exciting. Some of the best new designers and teachers coming together and

the energy is palpable.  More about it soon.

For now...it's back to work for me.

Have a great day everyone and remember to practice random acts of kindness...they can be incredible fun.

The Muse

Maybe it was posting about personal style yesterday, or talking to lots of people at the demo last night that got Morganna, my muse, all riled up and demanding attention.

What is a Muse?

According to Germaine Greer "A muse's job is to penetrate the male artist and bring forth a work from the womb of his mind"...."The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work."

Hmmm........

Well...I guess that explains why they're usually female. Not sure how that works for female or gay artists.

For me my muse is my creative subconscious, she's the part of me that gives me answers in my sleep, designs while the everyday, functioning part of me rests.  I believe we all have muses but I feel artists tend to listen to theirs more. Morganna does a lot of my design work, my job is to look at enough inspiring things so she'll have something to work with :)

Sounds great doesn't it?

It is....when it works, designs flow, create themselves, bead paths come in dreams spun like sparkly cobwebs.

Of course, as any artist will tell you, it's not always like that.

Muses can be the most contrary, fickle, demanding divas, they disappear for weeks on end, show up in the middle of the night when you would rather be sleeping and change your designs forcing you to rip out hours of work.

They are often THE biggest PITA!

But...that's the price we pay for their brilliance.

Morganna poked and poked me this morning, until, I gave in....at 5am on a Sunday morning! and got up to sketch what she was rabbiting on about.

A book.....different from the one I'm working on....and it is actually pretty much written if I listen to her.   New designs...oh, and this is where the contrary comes in....right after I blog about my personal style being Gothic and Vintage she comes up with a whole new line of contemporary designs.

It's like she's saying "try make THAT look Gothic!"

She's the best friend I fight with, the yin to my yang, the reason I take sleeping pills, the source of my designs, the one who ROFL's when I screw up, the devil on my shoulder and the angel in my heart.

Though she feels like a separate entity she is part of me....maybe the best part, certainly the most creative part.

So....if you know you're muse, treat her kindly,

and if you don't...then get very quiet and listen for her voice, if you're lucky, you'll hear her.

Personal Style

I wanted to write a bit about personal style and as I have almost finished the Gothic version of Gideon's Wheel this seemed like the perfect time.

It's way sparkly...just haven't got it to photo that way...yet!

As designers I think we all want to create our own personal style (see Project Runway) but feel pressured to give people what they want even if it isn't what we love to do.  I believe it's very important to have your own style but sometimes the most difficult part of that is knowing what your style is. 

Personally, I would not have told you a couple of years ago, had you asked, that my style was vintage because I had no clue that it was. I didn't discover my own personal style until I'd created quite a lot of jewelry and began to see the similarities of the designs.  I was fortunate to have had a fashion background to look at too and sure enough the style was there too. I discovered I have a thing for Elizabethan collars, and Rennaisance styling had shown up in my knitwear designs.

So, it's no surprise now that my personal style is Gothic, Vintage and Theatrical....even Costumey.

That established....how does it translate into todays jewelry market?

Well, though I tend to make every design in a black or Gothic colorway, which does attract a lot of people, I then bring color into the designs. I've recently started working with Margie Deeb's Color Report and that has made transitioning into color a lot easier.   And sometimes I just pick every color I wouldn't choose for myself and work with those....lol!  Yes....I have even worked in the dreaded pink!

What do I want to be known for?

My Gothic style.

I dream of my Gothic pieces being featured in a Vogue photoshoot and for some of my designs I actually start by thinking..."what would look good in Vogue?"

So...discover your personal style, pull the pieces you love the most and look for similarities...what are the colors, designs, shapes that say the most about your design view.

Once you've found it, stay true to it, keep it as your center path....and then play with the edges to reach more people.

The Virtual Storefront

After talking for the last two days about the home office it seems appropriate to talk about what makes a home business viable for the creative ones of us plus it coinicides with the day Artfire kicks into high gear.

It would be very hard, if not impossible, for so many of us to have our little businesses if it wasn't for the internet and sites like Ebay, Etsy and Artfire.

They give us a place to sell our wares and let us reach around the world.

It amazes me that my patterns can go to all corners of the world in the space of a week, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

Ebay has been around for quite a while now and while it's a great tool the prices have risen considerably.   Etsy is still relatively new and seems to me to have been created for artists and creative types and my only gripe is that sellers of mass produced supplies which tend to sell the most and bring in Etsy the most money appear to win disputes over the artists. But Etsy does seem to attract more of the serious handmade businesses...and let me explain what I mean there....

Sites like Etsy allow the hobby artist to sell their work too, which is great, however, hobby artists tend to under price their work because it is their hobby and they don't have to pay the bills with what they make.  This devalues the work of everyone who is struggling to make ends meet with their home business.

Artfire's launch today of the new flat lifetime rate of $5.95 a month (for those who opted in) is encouraging and hopefully will make them more known and increase the traffic on the site.  The price can't be beat, I pay three to four times as much at Etsy but after looking at the prices of the beadwork there, it's discouraging.  Obviously a lot of hobbyists sell their wares on Artfire, probably because of their free program.

So what is a designer/entrepreneur to do?

I figure I'll maintain both stores for six months and see which one does the best then review it. It is my experience that unless you work your store along with Facebook, sales and growth will be slow.

What will you do?