Kelley's Bead Studio Blog

Kelley of Kelley's Bead Studio has featured my beads in her blog! Check it out HERE.
Thank you Kelley!!!

Beaders Showcase

I've discovered a great new site called Beaders Showcase. It's a social networking site for lampworkers, seed beaders, and beadists of all kinds. I've set up a gallery there, commented on other people's galleries, joined the Lampworkers group, and made a few "friends"! Here's a widget with photos from my new gallery:

I hope you stop by and set up a gallery of your own! I'm accepting friend requests!

Helpful Site for Etsians

If you're an Etsy seller, you might want to check out this on-line tool at majaba.org. Type in your Etsy username and it brings up a list of who has hearted your shop, hearted individual items, and the ratio of views to hearts.

The list at majaba.org is easier to navigate than Etsy's (albeit slick and cool) "see who hearts this shop" feature. Try it when you want to heart back people who have hearted you. It's also informative - you can easily see what some of your most popular items are.

Try it out, it's fun. Click here to go to majaba.org.

I found this site when I was "blurfing" around to other bead blogs. Here is the post I found at The Beadful Life @ beadFX.

Studio Time

I just found out that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday, predicting six more weeks of winter! Well there's actually about seven weeks until the Spring Equinox, so six weeks is really not that bad.

Since the beginning of this month I've been enjoying lots of time in the bead studio. I decided to take at least three days off from the computer. I've discovered that I spend a lot of time on the computer and online promoting my beads in various ways, leaving myself no actual time to make the beads! So I set blogging and Etsy-listing aside and I've just been making beads for about four days. It's been great.

I'll have photos of my new work soon, but in the meantime here's a photo of some beads I have up on Etsy:

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

That's one of my favorite Sandy Denny songs from the 70's... a good song for this time of year:

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

I love to write in my blog as often as possible, every day if I can, but the past few weeks have flown by. I've had family visiting, I've been sick, I've gone out of town, all kinds of distractions to take me away from blogging! But I'm back, at least for today!

I have a favorite bead of late, made with Terranova glass. I've been wearing this one on a Bead Hitching Post pendant for the past week - I think it's a keeper! It's a landscape, with the Terranova at the top making the starry night sky. In addition to Terranova the bead has Vetrofond Odd Olive, Effetre, ASK Caramel Apple and Raku.

I love this new Terranova glass and I've gone and bought more of it already. I'm still practicing with Luna, too. Having a harder time getting a lot of color from Luna. This next bead has a Luna base with pure Terranova and Terranova/Luna stringers on top. The picture is a little low-res, but you get the general idea of what the bead looks like. I'm getting a lot of red and purple colors from these glasses.


I guess you could look at the Luna bead and say it does have good color, but I'm hoping to get more in the blue-green range and not just the orange. If it weren't for the addition of Terranova stringer on top, the bead would be mostly yellow/orange.

Watch Me Create Blog

This is a reminder to check out a great team blog I'm a part of called "Watch Me Create" on WordPress. There are a number of incredible beadmakers who publish articles about their creative process and beautiful pictures of their beads.
Go there now: Watch Me Create