Hello, Hope you are all enjoying the Bank Holiday weekend.

Well I thought I'd give you all a bit of Background about how the UK Beaders site came to be. I started it up in December 2004 but the ball (or should that be bead) really got rolling in April 2005, which is when I also started the MSN group.

When the site started out it had just 1 small page of UK suppliers, 1 of international suppliers and 1 for ebay sellers. It had other resources and a calender (which was sadly short lived as it was very hard to keep up to date).

Over the months the site developed to the point where we need 2 pages to list all the UK suppliers.

I introduced a top 10 tutorials page, but haven't had as many recommendations for this page as I expected.

As there are so many fantastic lampworkers selling their beads I have set up a page for them - which I must work on filling up this weekend!

The UK Shops map has been a fantastic success and has so far only been running for just over a week (wow I thought it was longer)!

The msn group is also growing weekly, we already have over 100 members with lots of great discussions going on.

Anyway that's enough background for now. But I'll keep you up to date with all the great things I have in the pipeline.

Phew, well as I said before this really isn't my thing, but I just managed to work out how to add in links to our main site and to the msn group - hooray!

Not a lot's been happening today, I have a custom bracelet I should be working on instead of posting here, but as we beaders know there's never enough hours in the day.

I've been talking to a few of the UK Beaders group recently about this and that, and I have a few ideas in the pipeline for even more developments so keep your ear to the ground.

Welcome to the UK Beaders blog!

First off Hi, glad you're reading this, and I apologize as I am so appallingly bad at writing this kind of thing!

I expect you'll have come here via http://groups.msn.com/UKBeaders or www.freewebs.com/ukbeaders if not I'd love to know how you found us!

I'm starting this blog as I hope it will evolve into another great resource of the UK beaders site and group. I'm aiming for it to be an easy to access blog of what's upcoming and worth a look in the UK beading scene. I'm hoping we can have interviews and articles from group members, projects and places worth trying out and much much more.

For those of you who don't already know me I'm Kitsch Kitty of Kitsch Kitty's Unique Boutique, and I'm the founder of the UK Beaders site and group. I love making jewellery and hated the lack of accessible information on the web for us UK beaders and jewellery makers. The few sites I did come across were either totally out of date, impersonal or seemed to have some kind of ulterior motive behind them.

Anyway that's about it for now, hopefully you'll be getting to see some really great content soon!