Checkitout! Look who made this month's online issue of Jewelry Making Journal!!!

http://jewelrymakingjournal.com/landing/issue-224/

Wow, I'm really stoked! Whether you're a beginner, intermediate or experienced jewellery-maker, Rena Klingenberg's Jewelry Making Journal is by far one of the best, most useful and user-friendly jewellery sites. I also added some more booth tweaks to my page, if any of you are planning to do shows this summer, whether indoors or outdoors for the first time or you've been doing it for a while. Or you can scroll back in my blog here and take a look at the pictures of the different table layouts I played with at the shows in July and November 2013 and March 2014. My absolute favourite is the March 2014 layout.

While you're on Rena's site, definitely read Dawn Kruchoski's article, http://jewelrymakingjournal.com/pegboard-tin-display-with-my-company-logo/ that inspired my ideas. I am still boggled by how compactly Dawn's displays are packed. But take heart, it's for absotively sure not something that can be accomplished overnight or even in a single season's worth of shows.

Here's my current sorting of short and affordable strings of beads. I can't believe it's taken me this long to do this: put all my beads up in one place. I can see at a glance what I have and, more importantly, what colours, shapes and sizes I'm missing... OR, that I already have. I'm forever buying the same string(s) over and over and over, not remembering that I already have plenty. On the grid along the back wall for now are my turquoise and lapis beads. I've also got all my wire hanging up, as well. Yes, the copper will eventually oxidise, but that's what Heinz ketchup is for.

I look at these and think to myself, gee, you know, I don't reeeeeally have that many beads. Nah. However, as my friends here will attest, I have bins and bins of beads that have never been strung... or used. Yet. But I'd better get motorvating at stringing more: we're at just over two months until the July Gem Expo in Toronto.

This morning I watched through the French doors a pair of cardinals flitting around in the lilac bush. Just yesterday, my bead-supplier pal Joanne down south of the lake in Erie captured this gorgeous blast of colour in her garden.

Thanks for looking!