I WON!!!

There have been so many giveaways recently and I DO love a good giveaway...Malin de Koning (one of my bead soup friends) had one to celebrate her recent birthday and guess what (I'm sure you already have from the title of this post!)? I won! It was a giveaway with a twist however, you had to leave Malin a tip in order to enter and she picked my tip as her favourite. Well Malin, I'm so honoured! I struggled to think of a technique (she is a great beader, not sure I could teach her anything new succinctly in a blog comment) or storage (she has just posted loads of pics of her lovely neat and tidy studio, currently my bead studio is my living room floor...) so I put this down for her...

My tip will be to KEEP LOOKING. Look beyond other 

beading artists; look to decorative/high/folk artists

 and see what they do and how they can inspire your work. 

Look beyond the obvious and you will find 

inspiration everywhere.

I'm so glad Malin felt this to be good advice. It's advice I try to follow myself - the beading community is GREAT, don't get me wrong but sometimes (and I'd include myself in this) we can be a little insular. I loved the recent Toulouse-Lautrec challenge on Art Bead Scene that Malin herself was chosen as a designer of the week for and I thought it was such a fantastic place to find inspiration. Loads of us are inspired by nature which is fantastic of course, but I am really interested in what artists in all mediums have done and are doing. Thanks Malin! I'm so chuffed that I've won your awesome bead soup!