TA DA! 300 POSTS!! WOOHOO!!!!

I finished my bracelet box, too!

Welcome to Blog Post #300! It's a milestone for me and I'm celebrating with a drawing for a Fabulous Prize - leave a comment on this post and your name will go into my trusty pith helmet.

EDIT:  CONTEST HAS  ENDED!

EDIT: CONTEST HAS ENDED!

After ten days, I'll have a drawing (supervised closely by Montag and Carmen) and announce the winner here! There's a picture of the prize at the end of this post (CONGRATS TO ABEADLADY, WINNER OF THE DRAWING!), and now on to the regularly scheduled nonsense:

You've all probably heard about the movie, "Julie and Julia." Before it was a movie, it was a book - "Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen". Before it was a book, it was blog - The Julie/Julia Project. If you haven't heard about it, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_and_Julia

Briefly, It's the story of a young woman attempting to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," in a year.  Me?  I hate to cook. It is absolutely not my thing. Which is not to say that I don't cook. I do, and I do it well. I just don't enjoy it. I think it's boring.

However, I DO love to bead interesting things. This IS my thing. On reflection, though, my repertoire of stitches is actually quite small. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I feel the need to grow my skills. I want – no, I need to learn every single seed bead and beadweaving technique that exists. And not just learn them - MASTER them. Sometimes when I'm designing a piece, I don't know exactly how I'm going to take it from sketch to three dimensional object and I end up making all sorts of compromises.

Well, no more. With Julie Powell inspiring me to be tenacious, having a library full of the best instructional and design books a beader could want, armed with the ability to learn just about anything from a book and possessing an ENORMOUS stock of beading supplies, I've decided I'm going to make almost* every project in the following books:

Creative Bead Weaving by Carol Wilcox Wells

The Art and Elegance of Beadweaving by Carol Wilcox Wells

Seed Bead Stitching by Beth Stone

And as if all that were not enough, I'll tackle the projects contained in four of the "Beadwork Creates" series: Necklaces, Bracelets, Rings and Beads.

That should fairly well stomp to death every seed bead technique that exists, but if I've missed any, I'll gladly take suggestions. I'm not saying I'll be entirely faithful to all the directions, and especially not to the suggested materials - to copy designs exactly would be far too boring, but more importantly my bead stash does have its limits! I'm determined to enjoy this, and if the going gets ho-hum, I'll do my damnedest to rev it up to where I need it to be. I plan to make each of the projects MINE. I'm not going to buy any more beads until this is through, so I'll most likely make a LOT of interesting substitutions.

My blog here is now the chronicle of this endeavor - and with luck my daily efforts, be they brilliant successes or abysmal failures, will provide entertainment for us all. All this will kick in as soon as I get back from vacation, in about 10 days – right around the time we have the drawing, so don't forget to leave your comment!

Next Episode: Morwyn vs. The Beaded Barrette (from Creative Bead Weaving)

Oh,and before I forget - here's the prize for the drawing -

The Beader's Guide To Color by Margie Deeb

EDIT:  CONTEST HAS ENDED!

* I say 'almost' because if its a stringing project, I'm skipping it. For me, stringing is - well, you know.