Resolutions!

Happy New Year everyone!

Did you make any New Year's resolutions?  I made the usual ones of course; eat more healthily, take more exercise and all the other ones that are usually broken by the second week in January, but I also resolved to keep moving forward with my beading.  I have exciting plans for an exhibition in 2012 and my butterfly mind keeps flitting to thoughts of that, but first I think that 2011 is going to be all about teaching.  I have 6 workshops lined up in the UK and Germany and I'm also planning on making more patterns available to purchase via my website, but all of that means a lot of detailed planning, writing instructions and drawing diagrams instead of designing new beadwork.  I do have a head full of new ideas to try out though, so watch this space!  In the meantime, I thought I'd remind you that one of my resolutions for 2010 was to start selling patterns directly from  my website and I now have 5 available - details below.  These are in addition to the 26 patterns that I have had published in magazines since 2008 and you can see details of all those on this page of my website.  Most of them are still available from the publishers as pdf's or back issues, so if you see one you like but can't find, drop me a line via the contact form on my website and I'll try and track it down for you.  All of the patterns below are available from this page of my website.

Core Beaded Beads tutorial

Poppy tutorial

Twinkling Tilas tutorial

Double Daisy tutorial

Rivoli Daisies tutorial

Bye for now!

Catching up and a new pattern ...

Gulp!  No blog posts for 7 weeks!  Where have I been?  What have I been doing?  Well I can promise you that I haven't been idle, but things have been a bit hectic just recently, so I'm afraid the blog had to have a little rest.  I've been busy behind the scenes, working on new ideas, writing patterns, judging contests, getting involved in challenges and discussing some exciting new teaching plans.  Hopefully I will be able to blog a bit more regularly again now and keep you up to date with what's happening.  So let's start by telling you that I have just finished writing my second tutorial 'Poppy' and it is now available to purchase via my website.

I had a very similar pattern to this one published in Bead magazine at the beginning of 2009, but the back issue is no longer available and several people have recently asked me if I could write my own instructions for it.  I had a group of wonderful 'testers' help me to fine-tune this pattern and so we think we have most of the wrinkles ironed out.  It's amazing how people can interpret things in completely different ways and I learnt a lot about writing patterns from this experience - thank you guys!  The tutorial is now 14 pages long and although it is written in English, there are lots of diagrams and photos to make things easier, and there are also instructions for optional leaves included.  I made the poppy above in traditional red and black, but take a look at the 'Readers' Gallery' page on my website (under Poppy) as there are lots of pictures there that people have kindly sent me, showing poppies in all sorts of colours with some fantastic inspirational design ideas - poppies definitely don't have to be red!