Scottish Bead Fair

Its that time again, the Scottish Bead Fair! I'm so excited, I love it, the atmosphere, the beads, seeing friends I dont get to see very often! Oh - and I'm doing a demo too, on how to use art clay silver and "capture nature". I'm going to have a little microphone and and a camera on my hands which will be a new one on me! So if you are coming to watch please SMILE at me :) Expect lots and lots of pictures soon!

In the Magazines this month .....

This month you can find two of my lampwork tutorials in Making Jewelery and Beads & Beyond. In Making Jewelery the project talks you through how to make a beautiful bead with real gold. Its one of the smaller pictures on the cover - the first on the bottom left...

And in Beads & Beyond there is a tutorial that will allow you to practice your stringer control without the need to be perfect - handy seeing as stringer control can be so hard!

In addition this morning browsing the web sites I found my Lampwork Bead Ring tutorial that appeared in Making Jewellery Issue 4 is now on the Magazines Web site - as are my beads - look at the Readers Gallery!! You'll also find excellent tutorials from my friends and fellow Art Clay Silver Instructors Lesley Messam and Tracey Spurgin.

AND dont forget about "Bead" magazine which is still available and contains my Silver Shell Charm Bracelet tutorial! Great for the last weeks of summer!

Where have I been??

My goodness, its been ages since I blogged, which is really bad because I've been doing really blog worthy things!! Did anyone miss me lol??

Any way - here is what I have been doing. Two weeks ago I flew down to Bristol for the PMC Symposium. It was a weekend packed full of seminars, exhibitions and shopping. With fantastic sessions from Robert Dancik, Tim McCreight, Lisa Cain & Jeanette Landenwitch it couldnt help but be an informative and inspirational weekend! As always it was a joy to catch up with my friends, but it was especially nice to make new ones! We also had the privilege of viewing an exhibition of some of the work so far submitted for the prestigious Masters Registry! Blimey - the work is amazing!! Thats Lisa Cain and Bristol above.

Last weekend Robert Dancik came to Edinburgh for his Faux Bone weekend! It was incredible. Never before have I been taught by such an inspirational, kind and generous teacher. Everything about Robert is positive - and he has an effect on people that is very rare, as he seems to generate self belief. The Faux Bone itself is a wonderful material that I cant wait to work with more. Its so strong that its almost impossible to break making it great for adding strength to fine silver. Everyone made some really amazing pieces, being a very talented group!!

I promise to come back with pictures of some work just as soon as I've edited them!!

Time for a change??

I'm toying with the idea of moving my blog over to word press. Its partly due to the desire to change my blog name - when I started blogging my intention was to blog about beady things to do with The Little Bead shop - but as time has passed my blog has become more about me and my own work and focuses on things other than our shop. I think this is a good thing, and has been a natural blogging journey - but my blog name no longer feels like a good fit.

I'm tinkering about with my "other" blog, seeing if I can add my favorite gadgets! I'm having problems with that - so who knows maybe I'll stay put. One thing I cannot find to have on a word press blog is the followers box that you can see on the right hand side of my blog. I like it, and love seeing that I have a new follower every now and then. I'd miss it. I also cant add a box linking to my new favorite thing - the Face Book Art CLay Scotland Fan Page. But even so - there are some undeniable pulls towards the other side !

If you are a follower and actually do read my blog every now and then I'd love to hear your comments about following me over.