Creating productive time for beading: how do you find it?

I decided to catch up with email reading today – reading emails I hadn’t had time to read last week. Ironically, several of them were about how to find time to do what you like to do! Beading is not everything in my life but finding some more time for seems a challenge. Etsy’s emails for online shop owners are full of advice on how to create time to move through the things that make for a successful online shop, The Beading Gem’s Journal listed 10 tips on finding time to bead and a piece on simplifying your life so you can do what you want to do appeared in my ‘junk’ mail folder. An omen??? Mind you distilling all this time-saving advice took quite some time! Here’s what made most sense to me in my efforts to have a regular, productive and calm space to bead:

• Do at least one beady thing today that gives you pleasure
• Limit the time you spend on the computer and/or texting, etc. as it is a major way in which time can be lost in current times
• ‘Edit’ and declutter your workspace so that it is not full of the unnecessary and the impossible - just spend 15 mins on it a day and celebrate what you achieve, knowing you'll do more tomorrow.
  
• Choose to do one beady thing today that you have been putting off for a while
• Create beading routines that allow you do to some beading you love every day
• Single task your beadwork, rather than multi-task – it’s less stressful
• Create a strategy for dealing with UFOs.

What works to make your beading time productive, enjoyable and as often as you’d like? I'd love to know. I'm off to try to put these handy tips into practice - 15 mins for declutter with the computer left off!!!

Colour my world, or should that be tint, shade, illuminate, saturate and add intensity to the hues of my world?

As some you of will know I have been working hard on completing my entry for the Victorian Bead Society’s (BSV) annual bead challenge. It was indeed a challenge but it is finished. Part of the challenge for me was finding a way to work with a colour palette that I don’t use very often – soft sage greens, aqua, deep blues and tans. That challenge, and writing a few words on discussion about the Colour Wheel at a recent local BSV meeting made me realise how little I knew about the origins of the Colour Wheel.

Little did I know it is but one of many systems for ordering colour in our world. Spirals, triangles and charts have each been used to organise and name the colours in our world (see Sarah Lowengard’s book for a great history of this). The creation of the Colour Wheel is generally attributed to Isaac Newton. In 1706 he developed his theory of colour. He observed the colours created when light passes through a prism and then created a way to represent their relationships to each other. He chose to represent their relationships in a circle in which each section of the circle represented a specific colour found in the prism and the way it was ordered ordered in the prism (their chromatic order). The Newtonian colour order was red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. There are several colour wheels but they generally organise colours into 5 types:

• PRIMARY COLORS. Red, yellow and blue. These are the colours all otheer colours are derived from and they cannot be made by mixed other colours.
• SECONDARY COLORS. Orange, green and violet :: These are the colours created by mixing two primary colours.
• TERTIARY COLORS. Red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet :: These colours are created by a mixture of primary and secondary colours.
• COMPLEMENTARY COLORS. Colors located opposite each other on a color wheel.
• ANALOGOUS COLORS. Colors located close together on a color wheel.

Using the Colour Wheel or other systems of organising colour draws on what is refered to as Colour Theory. Colour Theory provides rules and guidelines for creating different types of visual impact from how colour is combined, mixed and juxtaposed. If you’d like to learn more about colour theory there is a very easy to use free tutorial on the web: in http://www.worqx.com/color/color_basics.htm. You can use it to learn about the language of colour - learn the meaning of hue, saturation, intensity and more. With this knowledge you can play with the colour palette of your beadwork and experiment with colour combinations that are new to you.

Sources:

• http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/05/08/history-of-the-color-wheel/
• Sarah Lowengard (2008). The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Columbia University Press. http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/A_Chap03.html.
• http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html

Good resources on colour for beaders

• Deeb, M. The Beader's Guide to Color, Watson-Guptill Publications, USA.
  
• Classes by Margie Deeb – Colour Wheel Magic. http://www.margiedeeb.com/html/product.php?productid=281&type=19
• Wallace, S. The Beaders Colour Mixing Directory, Search Press, UK.
• Deeb, M. The Beader's Color Palette: 20 Creative Projects and 220 Inspired Combinations for Beaded and Gemstone Jewelry, Watson-Guptill Publications, USA.

Friday Facebook Fan and Blog Followers offer

TODAY ONLY - one free pattern of your choice from my destash shop if you are my 50th sale. Just made my 49th destash shop sale. To celebrate the 50th sale I'm offering a free pattern of your choice to the person who makes it 50 today. What a wonderful spring morning it is here where I live.