Change of direction!

I have listed ‘Eva’, ‘Maryshka’, ‘Katya’, and ‘Anastasia’ as OOAKs on Etsy. I won’t be making commisions of these, once they are bought that’s it! You’ve got the only one!

Other designs will be getting removed from Etsy, Zibbet, and Artfire, because I’ve made the decision to concentrate on ‘one of a kind’ designs rather than take commission work.

I did an exercise online the other day by entering the terms ’seedbeading’ and ‘beadweaving’ - hardly anything for the UK! We are a million years behind the US, France, Eastern Europe, and even Australia at this discipline of the Arts, I recently had an e mail from a lady who runs a bead shop and had seen my work saying that if I was ever in the area would I get in touch to arrange some beadweaving workshops - the location?…………..Cape Town South Africa!!

I appreciate that good bead stringing and jewellery making is an art, but we all know that there are thousands of self proclaimed ‘jewellery designers’ out there who are, let’s be honest, rubbish. This in itself is no problem, the problem arises when they are told by all around them that they are really talented and must sell at the next craft fair stall that becomes available. Nobody has the nerve to tell them how bad this stuff is, and echoes of ‘why doesn’t my jewellery sell?’ resound on every forum in the land!

Which brings me back to beadweaving. It’s difficult - sometimes bloody difficult, sometimes impossible, but always challenging. It has to be learned, either through trial and error - see above re rubbish - or at the hands of a good tutor. It isn’t an overnight craft, and has no shortcuts, but the results to the author of the finished work are stunning, think running ten miles - awful at the time, but you feel good at the end!  I’m hoping to begin teaching again next year, the legs have had me out of action for a couple of years, and I would love to believe there are people out there who want to learn a craft to achieve personal satisfaction, rather than have something to sell on at the end of the class. I’ll know whether I’m right this time next year!

I need a picture of me climbing down from a high horse don’t I?

This entry was posted on 30/06/2010 at 05:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.