A CONTEST!!!

Last week, two random thoughts collided in my brain. After popping some E.S Tylenol to deal with the resultant headache, I realized that the thought collision had produced An Idea.

More about that later.

Somewhere in my cyberspace travels (i.e. wasting time on e-mail, random bead and jewelry blog perusals and miscellaneous Googling) last week, I came across some advice from an established jewelry artist about periodically cleaning out one’s bead stash in order to keep things fresh, streamline the design process and not get overwhelmed with options, etc. Of course, my immediate reaction was “Get rid of BEADS? THE HORROR!” But then I started to think “Yanno, she might be on to something here.”

I mean, let’s face it. If we look in our clothing closets, don’t we all have that pair of jeans we’re keeping “just in case” we ever manage to fit in to them again? And then there’s that dress we bought to wear to that thing that one time that we’ve never worn again. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, we just tend to forget it’s in there. Oh and the sweater that still has the tags on it because OMG – WHAT were we thinking when we bought it and it was possibly a PMS-influenced purchase and…well, you get the idea.

Isn’t a bead stash kinda like that, too?

There’s gotta be beads in the stash that just aren’t ever going to get used. You know you look at them every time you open up your drawers and boxes, but you just don’t ever seem to pull them out. Maybe your design aesthetic has changed since you bought them or maybe you used part of a strand and are never going to use the rest or you bought 27 strands of one thing and you really only needed 26 and…well, again, you get the idea.

So, I’m thinking about this stuff all last week and sometime during that period, I was also talking (complaining) to a friend (long-suffering and patient with my whining) about how my blog has 12 followers (and YAY for my 12) but another blog has 44 and how come I don’t have 44 yet (um, it’s possible I have unresolved lack-of-popularity issues leftover from high school, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog probably requiring therapy and wine) and yanno, the kind of things you aren’t REALLY upset about but complain to your friends about anyway just because you know they’ll listen you. And in a blinding flash of insight (and possibly desperate attempt to get me to shut up) she says “you should have a blog contest.”

Hmmmm.

So I walk away thinking “contest” and “get rid of unneeded beads” and somehow in the swirling universe that is my brain (I sorta picture it like the orbit around Earth’s atmosphere where we have all that space junk that’s constantly smashing into each other and mostly then it just disintegrates or burns up during re-entry) those two thoughts crashed into each other and I came up with the idea to have a “Give Away My Unused Beads” contest.

All you need to do to be entered is to leave a comment and a link to your blog showing this give away. I will draw a random name on June 12th and that person will win a huge box of beads and beading supplies!

And when I say huge, I mean HUGE. Over the weekend, I started the great clean out. I’m only about halfway through and I already don’t have a box big enough for all the stuff.

It’s possible my hobby may be a bit more about bead buying than it is about jewelry-making. Shhh…don’t tell anyone I said that out loud.

Anyway, I’ll be honest and say you’re probably not going to find a strand of “A” grade amethysts in there, but there will be plenty of great stuff including stones, glass, lots of findings, charms and surprises. I’m even picturing that this could be a continuing kind of thing where the winner takes what she wants from the box, then adds her own cast-offs and runs her own contest and sends it on to the next person and so on and so on, etc.

Maybe I’ll post some pictures of some of the items between now and June 12th, but not too many. I think most of the fun of this for the winner will be to receive the box and get to dig through all the “treasure” and not know what they will find.

So, ready, set, GO!

KJ