Bead Peeps Interview

1. Why or how did you get started making jewelry?
2. What style(s) of jewelry do you like to make?
3. What materials do you prefer to use (and which ones do you avoid)?
4. What techniques do you prefer (and are there any you don't like)?
5. What colors do you use most, and which do you run screaming from?

Starting out on the Bead Peeps Swap and Hop, this promises to be a grand occasion and I really want to get it right. Linda posted some questions for us to answer and I'm so didactic that I'm going to answer them. Jewelry making  was the first pursuit I started at the senior center where a friend was teaching a class in jewelry making and I realized I was old enough to go to it. Soon I discovered I was fascinated by seed beading I taught myself through a collection of books. Last week I went to a bead retreat, Beading in Paradise down in Key West

what I learned at the bead retreat was that my work is sloppy. It got that way because I have learned from books and not people, when something was too hard or I didn’t understand it, I attempted to fudge. There was no one to offer criticism or to point out the importance of thread paths. It seems like these are little things but it add s up and this way makes the bead stand up correctly while that way makes it floppy. Having Kim Strathis to myself for 3 hours at the bead retreat while she helped me through every part of a not so tricky once you’d done it part, that was eye-opening to me.