New year, new challenges

Happy New Year - copyright Helen White

I hope you all had a good start to the New Year.

It has been a bit quiet since my last post, mainly because I have been busy in the run-up to Christmas, working on a proofreading assignment, making further improvements on the website (the shop layout is now horizontal instead of one long row) and my PTLLS course, which I have finished before Christmas. I am now waiting for my City & Guilds certificate to arrive. My tutor reckons it will take until about March. However I am happy to say that I passed my nerve wrecking micro teach – a teaching session of only 30 minutes, which is rather challenging for someone who is not keen on public speaking! And planning for only 30 minutes isn’t easy.

One of the reasons why I have done this course was simply to be able to teach jewellery courses on a 1-2-1 basis to people who are interested to learn but not keen on going to big classes. But I also hope to teach journalism courses for the NUJ. So these are already two things on my ever increasing list of things I’d like to do and achieve.

Last year I have featured a lot of crafters and jewellery designers and in December Kirsty Sullivan from Ladybird Beads has returned the favour and featured me in a long interview on her blog. You can read it here:

http://www.ladybirdbeads.blogspot.com/ I hope you like it. I also hope to improve my own PR and get featured in other blogs or magazines to get my brand more known.

Another thing on my list is to simply get my health back and being able to create jewellery without inevitable shoulder and neck pain. So I am hitting the gym and start exercising again. I haven’t been able to create new stock in the last 2 or 3 months and it’s not a nice situation to be in, especially as I have so many ideas in my head for designs. So this month I will ease myself back into creating things – and decided to work with one or two different techniques and materials each month.

As it’s very cold in the conservatory I am dreading the work bench a bit and so will spend January working in our living room. This means mainly bead work, as polymer clay is messy and the pasta machine is tricky to clamp onto our round table.

Once it gets warmer – hopefully in February I want to work with my new texture plates and get back to my polymer clay. My dad gave me a tumbling kit for Christmas which I want to use a lot too – which means working with PMC again. It’s unfortunately not a cheap material, so will start with a few designs and see how well they sell.

By the end of this year I want to change my logo to something that I think represents my jewellery better. The “logo” I have right now can be confusing as it just shows beads (photographed with my old camera before it started to tint everything pink!).

What I also like to do this year is to work with silver and copper and am currently waiting for a book to arrive by Jinks McGrath to help me get back to metal work.

Animals, especially cats, will still be one of my main themes for jewellery designs as I have noticed that my animal jewellery is quite popular with customers.

And finally  – if finances allow it – I would like to go on another jewellery course, as I think it’s important to learn new or improve existing skills.

So these are my plans for this year. I would love to hear from you. What would you like to achieve this year?