Beading Challenge Results!

Okay this is what everyone has been waiting for. A big thanks again to SantiamDesigns for providing the beads for this challenge and shipping them to all of us for free. I have heard from more than one person who did this challenge that is was a bit difficult to decide what to do with these beads. They are as small as they look ha ha! A lot of the designers had never or very rarely used beads this small. We were able to use our own findings as long as the beads that were sent were the main part of the design. I did my design on paper the day I got the picture of the beads because I didn't want to see what anyone else had done. I wanted to go into it without everyone else's ideas in my head. I am going to list them in the order that I received the pictures and I will be putting a link to each persons shop with their name. I had a lot of fun with this and I think everyone else did to.

StonesandStarlings







EarthlyCreations







Studiohart









melaniehazen








DesignedbyLucinda








byrobinlynne






virtuallori








SilverRiverJewelry







blackcoral








sleepingcatbeads









beadymonkey






TeaguesBeads







Okay so I really tried to get these to line up side by side so people wouldn't have to scroll down the page too far but I am not that good at hotmail so this is as good as it gets. I find this whole thing fascinating as there are some that are very similar and some that are very different. And nobody had any idea what any one else was doing so there was no way they could have copied or not copied any designs. I would love to have comments on this contest and maybe people will realize that for the most part if you see a design that is similar or even almost exactly the same as yours, chances are good that they didn't copy they just think like you do.

And as Cindy said " the challenge is a great way to make us designers maybe have to think outside of the box and stretch ourselves..."

I also got lots of comments that this was just a fun thing to do and I think sometimes we get so caught up in selling (which isn't a bad thing, let's face it, we would all love to make a decent living at this) that we forget why we started doing this in the first place. At least for me, get a huge amount of satisfaction and joy out of a piece but sometimes in between the picture taking, the constant promoting, listing and just regular life I can sometimes lose that sense of satisfaction. And while this is a type of promotion it was a lot of fun to do and there was that anticipation of the beads arriving and now the fun of seeing what everyone has come up with.

Beading Challenge

Well I was browsing through the Etsy forums ( which is extremely addicting, if you haven 't checked it out I highly recommend it, it is open to both sellers and buyers) the other day and there it was, another thread about "someone copied my stuff." Which of course started a debate on people coming up with the same design independently. Which happens all over the world all the time no matter what category of product you are hand producing. I am not saying that people don't copy, plenty of them do. I am also not saying that no one ever has an original idea because they do. However there are really only so many ways to make a circle out of metal, put bead on a string and make a tote. It's all in what you do with it as far as color, materials and that little something that is you and no one else. So I ran into a friend of mine on Etsy who happened to be chatting in the same thread (http://DesignedByLucinda.etsy.com) and I after some friendly banter I said something like "wouldn't it be neat if a group of us got together and using the same beads each came up with a design so that we could see how similar or different each persons design would be?!" Cindy said yes that would be so cool and then Kira (http://SantiamDesigns.etsy.com) said "Hey I would be willing to provide the beads and ship them to everyone". (Like anyone is going to turn down free beads to play with haha!). A couple of other people chimed in and said that they would be interested in joining us so the three of us decided that we would go ahead and give it a try. Not only would it be an interesting and fun thing to do but it would also be a good way to promote our shops. (We are really hoping for a storque article out of this). So Kira is providing the beads, Cindy is organizing and in touch with Rob from Etsy on the appropriate way to do this, and I am going to be updating our progress as we go. I will also post pictures of the finished products. I believe we will have a couple of judges although there is no prize in this challenge other than the satisfaction of seeing the outcome. (And free beads to play with). If this is successful we may decide to do it two or three times a year with a different person contributing the beads each time. So we will be posting our challenge in the Business and Marketing portion of the forums with Rob's permission and I will keep you updated on what happens next.