And the Winner is ....

No 7, NESS, Congratulations Ness !! Please email me so I can sort out your prize.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey, it is very interesting to look through the results, a quick summary of which -

Of the people who filled it in the majority are jewellery designers / makers, but from all different corners of the world which is amazing and fantastic (to me anyway !).

By far the most important thing for you in reading a blog was that you like the artists work, with good quality pictures and style of writing drawing for second place. 

Artists inspiration and the design process came up tops as the topics you were most interested in and Blue and Purple were far and away the most chosen favourite colours.

A big thank you again to everyone who took the time to do the survey and especially to those who left comments and questions which I look forward to answering soon ! 

You could WIN ... if you fill out the Survey

Ok, so gratuitously attention grabbing title !! The reason for this is I have noticed that following some of the recent events, blog hops etc round here, there has been quite an increase in the number of people reading and following the blog, thats so great, THANK YOU all !

As a result I have put a little  Online Survey together to get to know a bit more about who is reading the blog and the sort of thing that interests you.

Now I know not everyone is like me (I *love* surveys) and enjoys filling them out so I thought as an incentive we'd have a giveaway. To be in with a chance of winning it you need to fill out the survey (Its anonymous) then come back here and comment on this post to say that you have done so.

The prize will be your choice of either a set of beads and matching focal, or a Pendant and matching Earrings. I will keep the survey live until Sunday 20th March then on the Monday I will draw someones name to win from the people who have commented on this post.

The picture is some new beads, purely to have something pretty to look at, I will post a picture of the prizes next week when I have made them ;o) 

World Book Night

What a lucky girl am I ! You may have been hearing about World Book Day recently, or if you have been watching the TV this evening you may have come across World Book Night, an exciting and ambitious project to give away one million books.

Well I am very excited to say I am going to be getting one of those books, I will have a copy of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and with huge thanks to the lovely Mary Kent of Nemea Designs who is one of the people who was selected to be a "giver" and distribute copies of the book of her choice from those in the project.

Part of my excitement (other than new reading material to feed my book-worm habit) for this is that the books all have a unique identifying number on them, so that once I have read my copy I can pass it on to someone else to read who can log on the website that they have read it and then we can follow the journey of the book !! I think that is soooo cool. Once I have my book and have read and logged it I will share the number so you can follow it too.

If you want to get involved with this project then you can find all the info via the links above or register for World Book Night 2012 here.

Spring Garden

I have been busying myself with some more framed work, I got all over excited with an idea and decided I had to follow it through to a finished piece. I had been doing some research for my little pattern project  making some drawings and doing some initial work based on some photos from a trip to RHS Wisley when I decided I had to try the shapes I was drawing in glass (now there's a surprise...), with patterns on in the same way as I pattern my dragonflies. And this is what I came up with

It is in a white frame, just photographed on a black background (hoping for chance to have a proper "photoshoot" with it next week) but im sure you get the idea ! 

As you can see its not just glass, I have been playing with metal clay, fine silver and sterling silver too. Great fun as it has been a while since Ive had chance to use metal clay and I really enjoy the different effects you can get with it.

I think this is my favorite bit (dont tell the other flowers that though !!) I think Im going to make another flower in this style and work it up into a pendant. One of the best things about doing this has been all the other ideas and tangents it has generated that are now crowding around in my head. I cant wait till next week and some time in the studio to work on them.