This is the month I'm just going to USE MY BEADS

You know the feeling--you see beads, you HAVE to have them, but you're not sure what you'll use them for. It doesn't matter, it FEELS right to buy them and so you do. And the beads sit in your bead stash, waiting for 'that perfect project' to be used. Nothing but the best will do for those beads, no sir.

Or perhaps you buy the beads with a design in mind, but when you sit down to make the design, it doesn't come out the way you thought, so you unstring the half-finished necklace and put your beads away, waiting for the next strike of inspiration.

Months pass, perhaps even years, and all the while you're accumulating more and more beads, faster than you're using them. Before you know it, your bead stash is out of control and your creativity is suffering from second-guessing design decisions as you try to make every single necklace, bracelet, or pair of earrings a museum-worthy masterpiece of form, function and creative vision!

You can't live like that. Can't design like that. The 'great' traditional artists we all know didn't live like that (at least, not all of them); they made little 'throwaway' sketches or 'boring' drawings that didn't quite turn out. And it was ok.
Great artists know that just as they have great art inside them, they have a lot of boring/'bad' art.

What should we take away from this? That we MUST let the less-than-museum-worthy art out of ourselves right alongside the great designs that keep us up until 1:23 am. Trying to keep every non-great design suppressed will only lead to a creativity traffic jam.

It took me a long time to understand this and let my simpler designs take form, but this month, I'm going to do it! I will use up those beads in my drawer in nice-looking jewelry, but I will not pressure myself into making every single piece a show-stopper! At the end of the month I will have a creative collection of classy jewelry, more toned-down than my usual style, but still bearing my unique vision. Because if I make it and design it--it has part of me in it, and isn't self-expression what art is all about?

Teaching and troubleshooting

I've always been good at beadwork. Oh, I didn't make a perfect peyote stitch tube the first time I picked up a needle and thread (in fact, I accidentally kept making increases and so ended up with a flower-like shape) but that and my fear of brick and herringbone stitch is really the only time I remember having trouble with stitching. I had trouble making round loops to point up instead of to the side, and couldn't figure out how to manipulate wire into a proper wrapped loop for the longest time--but once I got over those initial hurdles, I don't remember having a lot of trouble perfecting them. And that was years ago; it's been years and years since I've had trouble looking at a graphic and right away having a good understanding of how a stitch works.

I do not say this to boast or brag. It has been a boon to me, but I'm not just an artisan, I'm a teacher. And having things come easily is a hindrance in my teaching. Even though I know things don't come easily to many people, it's still sometimes a little hard to understand why sometimes people don't know what bead to put their needle through in the next stitch. I always try to keep that sort of thought in check, unformed in the back of my head, telling myself I was a beginner too, once, even though I don't remember much of it.

But the other day, I tried bead crochet. I'd never been able to fathom graphed directions of fiber techniques beyond the first slip-stitch row, but I'd watched a tutorial video and thought I understood. Things were gonna be great! I'd learn bead crochet in a flash, and soon I'd be crocheting beaded ropes far faster than I could ever do with other stitches where I had to hunt for every bead and pull a long thread through every stitch.

Well, I did the first row ok, connected it into a ring (something I'd never been able to do before). Then it was time for the next row. Hmm. What exactly do I do? It involved sticking the hook through the 'next stitch'. Where exactly did I stick the hook? I couldn't quite remember, only some stuff about always sliding the new bead behind the hook. I didn't really know what my beadwork was supposed to look like--a sensation I didn't remember ever having had before. I decided to 'just do it', never mind doing it right, and finally stuck my hook through a stitch, continuing to crochet as best I could. I think I laboriously made it all the way around the ring, but could not figure out how to connect the first and last stitches, if I even needed to. My beadwork looked terrible, all loose and weird, not the nice tight ropes I'd seen others do. I couldn't tell if I'd done it right at all, as I still didn't know what it was supposed to look like.

After that, I'm filled with new admiration for my students. If they feel anywhere near that kind of bewilderment when trying something new, I'm so glad I had that experience, because now I can truly understand and sympathize--and understanding, I can teach better.

They never give up on peyote stitch or wrapped loops no matter how many times they have to ask a question. So I'm not giving up on bead crochet. But I'll need a few good and patient teachers to help me on my way!