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Bead Peeps Swap & Hop - My Partner and What She Sent
I'm so excited to be participating in a new-to-me swap and design challenge, this time hosted through the Bead Peeps Facebook group. And I'm thrilled to introduce my swap partner, Lori Alainn...
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Buckle Up - Show Season's Starting!
Alright, all you lovers of wacky tales of flying bugs the size of Volkswagons and men dancing in skirts, it's time for Summer Show Season! If you're relatively new to the blog, I do art fairs with my...
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Bead Peeps Swap 'n' Hop - The Creamsicle Conundrum
Bead swaps and design challenges are a great way to get the creative juices flowing, so when I saw a call on the Facebook group Bead Peeps for a swap, I was all in. And I lucked out, too, getting the...
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Busted, Blown, Weighted, and Moved -- The First Show Of The Season
I love doing art shows and festivals. I really do - I get to spend two days outdoors in the fresh air, meet fun and cool people, and hopefully make lots of folks happy with my jewelry.At one point, I...
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Creative Spark Summer 2016
For the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to be a designer for ZNetShows, a great supplier of cultured sea glass and other beads for retail and wholesale. A few times a year, designer/artists...
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A Long Hiatus, Killer Trees, and Show Lessons Learned
Hoo boy! If the road to perdition is paved with good intentions, my plans for making regular blog posts over the past seven months has me more than halfway down the road...Lots has happened over the...
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The Silver Lining To Packing The Bead Room
The hardest part of moving into a new home? (I mean, aside from the whole selling the old place and finding the new place. Or remembering your new address. Or driving home only to find you're in the...
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Theme and Variations
Crescents and rizos and tilas, oh my!The explosion of shapes in two-holed beads makes me feel a little like Dorothy in Oz - so many new things to explore.I spent one weekend at a show playing with...
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Re-imagining A Project
A while back, I played along in one of the A Time To Stitch challenges, and the theme was to bead a bag. I decided to work up a couple of covers for my key card holder to dress up a work necessity.I...
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Bead Hoarder Swap - My Partner and What She Sent!
There's nothing like a beading challenge to kick your creative juices into high gear. And considering that over the past year my creative juices have been tucked way, WAY in the back of my brain, I...
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Bead Hoarders Blog Party - The Reveal!
All beaders have those beads that they just can't let go of, and that they just can't bring themselves to make something with. Beader's block? Fear of not creating something that lives up to the beauty...
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Loving The Details
If you're looking for the Bead Soup Bead Hoarder's Hop reveal, go HERE!One of the things I love most about making jewelry (and one of the things that can be the most frustrating) is how a small change...
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UFO Spotting
They're every beader's dirty little secret.No, not the piles of beads that occupy every nook, cranny, and closet in the house.Not the urge to buy every color of the newest shaped bead. That's not a...
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The UFO -- Completed!
It's every beader's dirty little secret - that stack of half-finished, reconsidered, abandoned, incomplete, wrongly-turned projects that lie, lonely and unfinished, in the bead room. Our own stash of...
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A Beady Holiday
It's been a nutty six months. Seriously crazy. Upheaval at work, family job changes, losses of loved ones, moves - all said, not a lot of time or brain space to be creative in the bead room.So when I...
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Rediscovering My Voice
Y'all. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, my plans to blog more regularly over the past year has resulted in a lovely six-lane parkway to The Bad Place (extra points if you start...
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From the UFO Pile, or The Virtue of Letting an Idea Marinate
As part of my dive back into creating, I searched through my (extensive!) unfinished objects collection and found a pile of peyote tubes. I had made them as an experiment in making the same beaded bead...
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Bead Embroidered Necklace - Making Progress
Bead embroidery is one of my loves - it's easy to incorporate it into smaller pieces like here and here and here.But now and then it's time to take a deep breath and dive into something a little more...
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Notes From The Road :The Land of The Incredibly Tall Festival-Goers
Y'all, it's been a while. While I'd love to excuse my silence by saying I had been doing something really cool, it's just been life getting in the way.Surely you can relate.ANYWAY, life finally allowed...
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Rebranding and Refreshing
So it's been a while since my last post, and good grief, it feels like a completely different world. I hope that you and yours are well and safe, and finding your way through the challenges of the...
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Upcycling a Treasure Trove, Saving the Environment
Every now and then, it's an exciting challenge to work with new material, something unfamiliar or unusual that kicks up your creative spark and leads you down some new paths. Over the next few posts,...
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Using the Treasure Trove, Pt. 1
As promised, I want to share the process of using some of the fabulous trims I got at the Zero Landfill event. One of the biggest challenges with the trim samples is that they are small, short, and...
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Using the Treasure Trove - The Ball Fringe Conundrum
The flat trim that I used to make one of these bracelets (the center one in the top photo) originally had ball fringe attached.As much as I like a good ball fringe (I mean, who doesn't?), the idea of...
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Using the Treasure Trove - How Do You Tame A Tassel?
One of the first things I pulled from the treasure trove of upcycled goodies to experiment with was tassels. There are basically two types: the shorter versions, which are typically more of a cotton...
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Bead Soup Swap and Create (and Giveaways!!)
(I'm also posting photos on my Facebook and Instagram pages - please check them out and maybe you can win a giveaway from this collection! Leave a comment here, and win your choice from the three pairs...
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