Beading comes back

Ah, what a wonderful and productive day, despite a good 3 hour nap in there. Mom and I spent time reviewing our current kits and figuring out which ones to discontinue for our new goodies. Making sure we had a good mix of beginner to more advanced, bracelets to necklaces, etc. We still need to do some color analysis to make sure we're not going to be surprised next month when we put everything out and realize it's all green. Sometimes you get on a roll with a certain color palette and don't realize it.

We also spent some time going over our display and how we plan on changing it up next year. We ordered a few new display pieces to check out how they make everything look before we order tons of them. One critical piece was on back order - of course! But we can work around it for now. I need to call and check on when they expect them back in stock though.

And then this afternoon, the designing muse struck, and I've been beading since probably 7pm straight through until now - 3:15am, so a little over 8 hours. This is what happens when I'm designing. Chaos on my end table in the living room. And this is a pretty controlled version of it! Note the all-important Diet Coke right in the middle of things. And you can see one small sample of the too-curvy version on the left.

I've gone through approximately 7 different iterations of the design, but I'm pretty sure I've finally got the real thing. First I was experimenting with different bead sizes to get the right necklace curve, and once I finally got that figured out, I was working on colors and what kind of dangles to hang off it. (Keshi pearls did the trick on the gold/green one, and turquoise on the blue/sage one.)

When I get the necklace finished, you KNOW I'll show it off to you! Perhaps Monday. I'm not sure I'll have time to finish it Sunday since I'm teaching Sunday evening. But I have something else to give you a preview of on Sunday! Oh, happy days...