Getting ready to party!

It's Bead Soup Party time again! I'm really excited to be taking part again, especially as I had to miss the last one as Jamie was so little. For those of you who haven't come across the Bead Soup Party before (where have you been?!?), you can read more about it here, but basically Lori Anderson decided to set up a bead party on the internet where partners sent each other bead soup ingredients and had to make something from what they were sent as she didn't live close enough to other beaders to arrange one in real life. It has grown so much! I took part in the first two which had about 80 and 100 people respectively - this fourth party has nearly 400 people from all round the world! Lori has worked so hard to pair us all up and to make sure that we all know what we're doing. She does the pairing up herself rather than allow a computer programme to do it randomly to make sure that we all have partners who will challenge us.

My partner this time round is Janna Harttgen and you can find her blog here http://palimpa-lim.blogspot.com. As you can see from the photos above our styles are very different - as Janna described it I like shiny and she likes more unusual rougher materials! Janna uses a beautiful mix of materials in her jewellery, and is far more adventurous than I am - I hope that some of that will rub off on me! For example, Janna described the gorgeous earrings above as "I riveted links of an old amber bracelet of mine onto the halfs of a found bottle cap and added indonesian glass beads and matte onyx drops" - I would never have thought of doing that! I can sometimes find myself making the same style of jewellery over and over and losing a bit of spontaneity from my work, especially when I've got a lot of orders from my NOTHS shop or from a gallery (for example I've got 20 keum boo pendants to make this week for a gallery), so I'm hoping that Janna's bead soup will challenge me and get me creating something very different from my usual style!

My bead soup ingredients went in the post this afternoon - fancy a sneak peek?

I do love playing about on picnik!

You can also see a sneak peek of what Janna has sent me on her blog here. You'll be able to see the soup ingredients in their full glory when we've received them, and you'll be able to see what we've made on 17th September!