I enjoy the nearly instant gratification of simple slice beads. The canes for these are simple to do and are either made small (10-15mm) or reduced to that size. The resulting beads are tiny little treasures.
As you can see, todays batch had fruit. There are more summer fruits ahead and a few (dozen) more flower types!
Anyone want to drill holes in a couple thousand tiny little beads for me?
I thought the Canadian postal system was enemy enough but working as half of the Claychicks, I’ve had to learn to deal with the US one as well! Part of my shipment to Carolyn arrived so I listed part of it being that slightly obsessive keener that I am… 3 of my favourites from this boxful include:
Caro is working on getting her stock sorted out and into the Claychicks shop too. She’s planning out little grab bags of canes – good segments by weight but not in any particular size as right now her wrists are on light duty only. Not that there is such a thing as light duty with infant twins!
One of the upsides of even the slowest of shows is you meet the very best people. Mid-April I had the luck of a show that got snowed out. Very few of the vendors appeared to set up and even fewer customers! So as happens at slow shows, the vendors sort of chatted and hung out. As I tend to do, I went and got the jewelrymakers to come take a peek at my beads.
One of those vendors was Nadine of Miyaw Designs. She was interested in some of the simple logo beads I had and asked if I’d be able to do something with a symbol they use (mother-daughter team) often in their work. So I agreed to give it a whirl, and here’s the prototype:
The infinity symbol is used as one of the symbols or logos of the Metis nation, most often on a background of navy or red. Armed with that I tried it in navy, making the rectangle first then making a segment of that into a round cane. Next, I’m working with some embellishment ideas to make more ‘interesting’ slice beads. Here’s one:
April 2008 marked the second full year my blog-web site combo has run! The site averages just about 600 hits a day with 120 unique visits. There are more than 40 pages and 120 blog posts now. There have been nearly 200 comments on my posts and Akismet tells me that it has munched 8,890 spam items since I installed it.
The most common entry pages are my free tutorials. The web shop has more than 80 items (though some seem to regularly, gratifyingly go out of stock!) with a few being added each week.
The site got a redesign and new gadgets added this year. I streamlined some parts and added the widgets for the web shop and contact pages. There are a few new freebie tutorials in the works and I am slowly fleshing out my gallery section. I started using Flickr to keep a record of what is happening with my art over time, added my polymer clay blogroll to my sidebar on the blog front page.
Overall I’ve learned an awful lot just by the exercise of running this place – improving my photography, my technique, focusing on the core parts of a project, social networking and on and on. Here’s hoping that year #3 is just as gratifying as the first two.