Studio Saturday: Humblebeads

Welcome to Studio Saturday! Each week one of our contributors gives you a sneak peek into their studio, creative process or inspirations. We ask a related question of our readers and hope you'll leave comments! As an incentive we offer a free prize each week to bribe you to use that keyboard. The following week we choose a random winner.

This weeks winner is Carol D.. Congratulations! You have won a pair of earrings from Rebecca Anderson of Songbead. Send Rebecca a message with your address and she will get them right out to you.

Welcome to the Humblebeads Studio today!

I have been busy designing and debuting a new collection of autumn inspired jewelry.  I work in series with pieces that can mix and match together.  This line of jewelry is one that I created to wholesale so they are pieces that can be created over and over again.  

Some designers do like the process of production work, I don't mind it.  It's much easier to design once and recreate the same pieces over and over again.  I like to do a mix of both one-of-a-kind pieces with the production work.  Mainly because I have an awesome stash of art beads that can only be one-of-a-kind designs. 

I have been taking a class with the Flourish & Thrive Academy on Ramping up Your Holiday Sales.  This is pushing me to reach out of my comfort zone and stretch myself to be completely prepared for the holiday season.  (Stop giggling at me, I'm almost there!)

Ideally I should have had the fall pieces ready to go by the beginning of August but working that far ahead is something I'm learning to do, it doesn't come naturally to me!  I love creating designs inspired by the current season, but as a professional designer that doesn't work.  Unless one day I'm so far ahead of the game that I'm working a year head.  

Ha, that will NEVER happen!

The Flourish & Thrive Academy have two free resources I would like to recommend to you.  The first I have shared here before - but it's worth sharing again.

151 Ways to Boost Your Holiday Sales - Just the like title says, this list is jam packed with great ideas to get a jump on your holiday sales.  Use the list to make and work a plan for your best sales season yet!

20 Sales in 20 Days Challenge  - Totally free, no strings attached 20 days of challenges to help you sell your jewelry! The challenge starts at the end of the month, but I would sign up today so you don't forget!

So now the fun part - FREE BEADS!!!  One lucky winner will be chosen by random to receive a set of my Bittersweet Disk Beads - one of my favorites for fall!

My question for your this week - Are you selling your jewelry this holiday season?  

If yes, do you do craft shows, trunk shows, home shows or sell to stores? Do you have an usual event or place you sell your jewelry?  Share your story this week!

Etsy Finds • September Monthly Challenge Art

'Art Bead Scene - September Monthly Challenge Art' by gaea

Alphonse Mucha is one of my favorite artist! His whimsical and fluid designs are calming and mysterious. These design elements marry well with this months challenge art, Autumn, from Muchas "The Seasons (series)".

Handcrafted Large Copper Cuf... BohemianBeads $55	Boleslawiec Polish pottery b... WarsawAccent $13	Gorgeous gold metallic finis... Glassmania $28	Intricate Geometric Art Bead... selenaannewell... $4
Orange and Yellow Enameled L... BeadSwedeSuppl... $8.5	Bird Link / Handmade Ceramic... gaea $12.5	Silk Bracelets, Silk Ribbons... RibbonsAndSilk $15	Two Art Nouveau Brass Flower... PatinaQueen $2.5
Glass Pods Headpins Lampwork... NadinArtGlass $12	beaded crochet trim, handmad... PashaBodrum $18	Chestnut Brown Brass Oval Ch... missficklemedi... $7	Art nouveau Mucha lady brass... WarsawAccent $5
Artisan Copper Precious Meta... dreamgirlbeads $24	Pastel Peach and Green Petal... BohemianBeads $55	Silver Vintage Mucha Maiden ... ChasingTheSpar... $3.29	AZ Lampwork Handmade Forged ... AzLampworkBead... $17

Sponsored by send bulk email from excel.

September Monthly Challenge Color Palette

This month's painting, The Autumn by Alphonse Mucha, is a perfect palette as we slide out of summer and right into fall. Don't you think?

Unlike past challenge palettes, which usually featured a bunch of different colors, this month's challenge painting has colors in a fairly narrow range, focusing mostly on shades of orange and yellow. The browns and tans you see all come from those two colors, so these would be a great base for your own color schemes. Stay on the medium to light side for these to better match the source painting.

To keep things interesting, there are touches of red and green in The Autumn, too. Out of all the swatches I pulled, the red is the darkest shade, so use that as a guide for your own work and go with darker reds. If you're following the distribution of color in the painting, use that darker red only sparingly.

As for the greens, there are a few different shades - the two I picked were my favorites. Behind the oranges and yellows, green would be used the third-most, and range from very light sage greens to a darker forest green. But like red, there are touches of green everywhere, but they are just touches, so use them purposefully.

I hope this helps you create your challenge pieces this month!

September Monthly Challenge Prizes + Sponsors

Our Wonderful sponsors for the September Challenge.
We will have 2 Lucky Winners this Month!

Songbead

Rebecca Anderson of Songbead makes wonderful jewelry from beads, notions and other curiosities.  Rebecca offers Czech glass beads, handmade findings and waxed linen cord at The Curious Bead Shop on Etsy, perfect to compliment your art beads. Pop on over there to see all the fun stuff she has to offer!

Rebecca is donating a $50 goodie bag from The Curious Bead Shop.

 Visit Rebecca at her Songbead, The Curious Bead Shop and Facebook.

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Mary Harding Jewelry

Mary Harding of Mary Harding Jewelry creates wonderful ceramic beads, buttons, charms, pendants and jewelry components, using nature as her inspiration. Mary uses different clay bodies and glazes to bring you her impressions from nature. Great additions to your jewelry creations!

Mary is donating a $50 gift certificate in her website.

Visit Mary on her website, Blog and Facebook.

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Submit photos of your wonderful creations using one or more Art Beads.

Autumn (Seasons Series) by Alphonse Mucha has with many different elements that can be used for inspiration: figures, yellow, orange, red, nature, fruit/harvest and toanl values of colors.

We can't wait to see where your creativity takes you with the art for this months challenge! 

Please remember to put SEP ABS in the title or tag of your submission(s).  

Provide us with the artist of the Art Beads used and we always love to know all the materials you used. 
***Art Beads MUST be used in your entry.***

September Monthly Challenge

Autumn from  "The Seasons (series)", 1896

Alphonse Mucha 

Oil on Panel

About the Art

This was Mucha’s first set of decorative panels and it became one of his most popular series. It was so popular that Mucha was asked by Champenois to produce at least two more sets based on the same theme in 1897 and 1900. Designs for a further two sets also exist.

The idea of personifying the seasons was nothing new – examples could be found in the works of the Old Masters’ as well as in Champenois’s other publications. However, Mucha’s nymph-like women set against the seasonal views of the countryside breathed new life into the classic theme. In the four panels shown here, Mucha captures the moods of the seasons – innocent Spring, sultry Summer, fruitful Autumn and frosty Winter, and together they represent the harmonious cycle of Nature. (Mucha Foundation: “The Seasons (series)”)

Mucha used lithography as the printing technique for his posters. The posters are usually signed in the block. Some of his posters were produced as sets like The Four Seasons. Complete sets count among the most searched for of his works.

About the Artist

Alfons Maria Mucha was born in Ivancice, a small provincial town in the Czech Republic. He started his artistic in stage decorations and decorative paintings. He studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1885 until 1887.After Munich, Mucha moved to the "mecca" of arts, Paris. Here he studied with different teachers and worked on small commissions for book and newspaper illustrations.

In December 1894 Mucha became famous with a commission for a poster for the actress Sarah Bernard. Sarah Bernard was a celebrity of her time. He received an exclusive six year contract by the actress not only designing all her posters, but her theater decorations and costumes as well. From now on the artist was swamped with commissions for all kind of commercial print advertising.

During the course of the next 10 years, Mucha became one of the most popular and successful of Parisian artists. Commissions flooded in - for theatre posters, advertising posters, decorative panels, magazine covers, menus, postcards, calendars. Mucha's designs for jewellery, cutlery, tableware, fabrics etc were in so much demand that he conceived the idea of creating a 'handbook for craftsmen', which would offer all the necessary patterns for creating an Art Nouveau lifestyle.

Between 1904 and 1921 Mucha traveled frequently to the United States, during this time he married and had a daughter. Mucha returned to Bohemia in 1910.  He spent a large part of the remainder of his life creating the 20 paintings which make up the Slav Epic. These monumental paintings, some of which measure as much as 6 by 8 metres, celebrate more than a thousand years of Slav history, divided between specifically Czech themes and those of other Slav peoples. The canvases were completed between 1912 and 1926 and in 1928 Mucha and Charles Crane officially presented the Slav Epic as a gift to the City of Prague.

In 1939 the German Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. The popularity of the artist made him a number one target for the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. He was arrested, interrogated and realeased. Shortly afterwards, Alphonse Maria Mucha died on July 14, 1939 in Prague. His Slav Epic paintings were hidden away at the beginning of the war and lost to the art world until 1968 when they were placed on permanent exhibition in the castle of Moravsky Krumlo.

(Resources: Artelino and the Mucha Foundation.)

Blog Tour

The Blog Tour deadline is September 27th.

Links must be added to the Art Bead Scene flickr page where you upload your entry. 

The Blog Tour will be on September 30th.

Monthly Challenge Winners

Winners will be randomly chosen from all the qualifying entries on October 1st.

Our Sponsors

Our Sponsors this month are Songbead and Mary Harding Jewelry.

Please visit us tomorrow to see the prizes!

Featured Designer of the Week:

From all the entries during the month, an editor is going to pick their favorite design to be featured every Monday here on ABS. We want to give our participants more time in the spotlight! Our Featured Designer will be this Monday, so get those entries in soon.

How to enter the Monthly Challenge:

1. Create something using an art bead that fits within our monthly theme. We post the art to be used as your inspiration to create. This challenge is open to jewelry-makers, fiber artists, collage artist, etc. The art bead can be created by you or someone else. The challenge is to inspire those who use art beads and to see all the different ways art beads can be incorporated into your handiwork. 

An Art Bead must be used in your piece to qualify for the monthly challenge.

***Beads strung on a chain, by themselves and beads simply wire or cord will not be accepted.***

2. Upload your photo to our flickr group. Detailed instructions can be found here and click here for a tutorial for sending your picture to the group.

Please add the tag or title SEP ABS to your photos. Include a short description, who created the art beads and a link to your blog, if you have one.

Deadline is September 30th. Photos are approved by our moderators, if a photo hasn't followed the guidelines it will not be approved. You may upload 2 photos a day.

What is an Art Bead?

An art bead is a bead, charm, button or finding made by an independent artist. Art beads are the vision and handiwork of an individual artist. You can read more about art beads here.

***A bead that is handmade is not necessarily an art bead. Hill Tribe Silver, Kazuri ceramic beads or lampwork beads made in factories are examples of handmade beads that are not considered art beads.

Beaded beads, stamped metal pendants or wire-wrapped components are not considered art beads for our challenge.***

p.s. If you have a blog, post your entry and a link to the ABS challenge to spread the beady goodness.

August Monthly Challenge Winner

Congratulations to this Month's winners! 

We have 2 winners chosen randomly from all the challenge entrants. 

Congratulations to our first lucky winner - Ann Schroeder! 

Ann has won $50 worth of pendants from More Skye Jewels!

Our second winner is Susan Delaney! Susan has won a $50 gift certificate to Slate Studios Supply.

Thank you MoreSkyeJewels and Slate Studios Supply for being our August Monthly Challenge sponsors!

Winners, please E-Mail Tari, tari@claybuttons.com with your information (Name and address) so your prizes may be sent to you.

 

A Big THANK YOU to everyone who entered this month's challenge!

 

We were so fortunate to have so many beautiful entries and experience such creativity from our wonderful readers.

 

Visit us tomorrow to see what our Facebook page fans voted for as our September Challenge!

Studio Saturday and Show Me Sunday!

Welcome to Studio Saturday Sunday! Each week one of our contributors gives you a sneak peek into their studio, creative process or inspirations. We ask a related question of our readers and hope you'll leave comments! As an incentive we offer a free prize each week to bribe you to use that keyboard. The following week we choose a random winner.
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This weeks winner is Malin de Koning. Congratulations!
You have won a Happy Camper pendant from Gaea Cannaday.

Send Gaea an email with your address and she will get them right out to you.

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This week we visit the studio of Rebecca Anderson of Songbead and The Curious Bead Shop.

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Woops! Today is very much Sunday, isn't it? Anyway, better late than never - here's a combined Studio and Show Me Post, all in one. 

August was a full-on month for me. Straight on the heels of a fantastic actor/musician production down in London and The Lake District, I leapt straight into the longest craft fair I have ever done - 23 straight days! Phew! Doesn't it make you want to go and have a lie down, just thinking about it? The West End Fair ran from the 3rd to the 25th August. 

Before it began, I really didn't know what to expect - the longest event I had done previously was over a weekend. I had been to The West End Fair as a customer many, many times - but still, that doesn't necessarily prepare you for the reality of trading at such an event. 

Despite slight trepidation, the fair was an absolute blast! I had a teeny tiny booth, which you can see here:

I was pretty pleased with how we got it set up thought, despite the size. I even had a scrap of space at the back to work - which was absolutely essential, as I had virtually no back stock! Top tip for those doing long fairs - make more jewellery than I did, before the event! I spent all day, and many evenings working into the wee small hours, creating more jewellery for the stand the following day. 

I was lucky to be surrounded by some really excellent - and lovely! - other makers, and without them, the fair could have been a totally different experience. There was a great sense of camaraderie and support amongst us - coffee runs, toilet trips, and morale boosting on those days that dragged on more than others! There were also several other designer-makers there who had done the fair many times before, and it was great to get the benefit of their experience. 

All in all, it was a truly fabulous experience and one I would do again in a heartbeat - well, in a year at any rate! Here are a few designs that sold over the 3+ weeks:

My question to you is, what's your favourite part of taking part in craft shows? Leave your answer below to be in with the chance of winning a pair of Songbead earrings! 

And now for the Show Me Sunday part of our broadcast.....

Today is the 1st September, and it's back to school time for some of us! So I asked you to share tutorials, books, tips etc.....

Kathy shared Sally Rusick's tute for beading bezels. Sally is not only an amazing jewellery artist, but also a fantastic photographer, and her video tutorials are super clear. So do take a minute to check out both her tute and her blog!

Share your favourite tutorial with us this week in the comments below! 

And now for the Bead Blogger Links:

About.com Jewelry Making 

Combine shells, bamboo beads, and hemp for this unisex necklace design. 

Art Bead Scene 

Check out this month's Blog Tour - see all the wonderful creations that our readers came up with, inspired by Rufino Tamayo's Tres Personajes. 

Beading Arts 

To help celebrate "Metal Month", Cyndi has collected links to some amazing tutorials for you to try! 

Carmi's Art/Life World 

Have you tried Chinese knotting yet? Carmi has a wonderful tutorial on her blog this week! 

Resin Crafts Blog 

Making a locket picture last is easy with resin. 

Snap out of it, Jean! There's beading to be done! 

Jean's teaser post for Beads & Baubles and what she received from the store to design with is pretty dramatic! See her blog! 

The Writing and Art of Andrew Thornton 

Check out what the participants of the Inspired by Reading Book Club made for August's book, "The Infinities" by John Banville. 

Rebecca is a Scottish jewellery designer, currently living in Manchester, England. You can read more about her and her work at her blog, songbeads.blogspot.com and see more of her jewellery at songbead.etsy.com. She also has a supplies shop at thecuriousbeadshop.etsy.com.