Tuesday, March 9, 2010

New Blog, New Season of Life

Starting a new blog is like moving into a new house. It takes a while to get all the furniture into the right places, the boxes unpacked, and the art on the walls.

So everything is a bit new, a bit unsettled. I need to get my domain, www.beadencounter.com, pointed to this blog so it's easy to find, and I need to do that before I start publicizing the blog. I need to get a graphic I own in place of the sample that I swiped off a photo site. I need to take a whole bunch of pictures of my beading and upload them, because that's really the interesting part, isn't it?

My day job is building databases. Lately it's also been as a publisher of my husband's book(s). Now, I'm making a little time for me. It will be a balancing act, as I need to make money, and as much as I've found I enjoy blogging, every bit of time spent writing is taken away from beading. And that's getting more and more important to me.

It's odd. I've been collecting beads for 25 years, literally. Long ago, I put together a few necklaces for family and friends. When I met my husband in 1995, I was wearing a necklace of malachite hearts I'd strung myself. In between, I would occasionally run across a string of beads at a flea market or other venue that made my heart go pitty-pat. But actually visit a bead store? It never occurred to me.

During that time, my art outlet was art quilting. I loved working with the colors of fabrics, the designing was exciting, and the assembly process was soothing. I loved putting that last stitch in a finished work. But life intervened. My new studio situation in California was less than ideal, my inspiration flagged, and then problems with my knees made it physically more difficult to do the work. I still collected fabrics, but will probably purge most of that soon. Anyone want to come to a massive quilter's yard sale? Really. Let me know. I'm going to sell thousands of yards by the pound.

I've had a brief fling with glass mosaic work. I love it, actually, and am currently working to get a glass studio set up in a room vacated by an adult daughter who moved out. My first three large pieces, though, through a tragic accident, went the way of all glass. They're currently being held together with sticky clear shelf liner, preserved only for the design. I cried. I'm still not done with this art form, though. The wonderful play of color and light led me directly back to....

Beading. It's small-scale, and so physically easier for me. The storage of materials is much less demanding. I find it absolutely astonishing how much value you can pack into a teeny bag at a bead store, don't you? A piece can be finished in less than an hour, or take weeks, depending on the technique and complexity. All of my art previously has fed into the designs and informed my color choices. I'm really liking the way my style is developing, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

So I'll be talking about all that here. There's so much to talk about. The wonderful bead stores I've found here in southern California, in Florida, in Arizona, and elsewhere. How I store and organize my beads. The software I'm developing to inventory my holdings and provide cost information for my finished pieces. The inspiration for my pieces, and the people I come into contact with in the process of developing my art, and the business of my art.

I'll be asking for input in the software development process, as there are many artists who are more expert than I am in making, pricing and selling their work, and I need that community to guide me.

I hope you'll come along with me, as I get the furniture arranged, all the corners tucked in, and the cookies in the oven, in this new BeadEnCounter of mine.

No comments:

Post a Comment