British Bead Awards 2010

Are you entering the British Bead Awards this year? Last year's competition was the first of it's kind and a great step forward in recognizing the amazing talent that we have here in the UK! Three members of the UK Beaders forum took home awards; Kerrie Slade came joint 2nd in the Seed Bead category with her beautiful Maid Marian's Quiver, Julie Fountain came 1st in the Other Finished Beadwork category with her Dazzle Silver Core Pendant, while Lynn Davy won an impressive three times including 1st place in the Crystals catergory with Fading Beauty.

There's still time to enter your masterpiece into the British Bead Awards 2010, the deadline is Friday July 2nd and you can download the entry form here as well as view the competition rules and a complete list of last year's winners. And for everyone that's entering, best of luck!

A new beginning and purpose for the UK Beaders Blog!

Hello everyone.

As you can see it's been rather a long time since I lasted posted to this blog! Indeed our forum is now celebrating it's 4th anniversary and we are expecting our 2,500th member to join up any day now - will it be you?

With so much going on in the UK Beaders community these days, and so many wonderful blogs that our members (and other great creative people) are writing, I realised it was time that we revived our long abandoned blog and brought it back to life as as the UK Beaders community blog. A place where our community members can post together to bring you a wide range or posts on all sorts of things about and of interest to us beaders and jewellery makers.

So if you are a member of our forum you may have already seen that we are inviting any interested members to join in writing this blog, and share their beady thought with us here too.

It’s been a great week

Well some great new, this week our forum registered it’s 100th member!!! Considering the forum has been online for less than 7 weeks this is wonderful news and just backs up what we already knew: beading in the UK is growing in popularity and beaders are looking for recognition, and a place to network and chat with their fellow beaders.

I’ve given a bit of an update to the UK Beaders main site by reorganising the UK supplier’s pages. With well over 200 suppliers in the UK listed it is now easier to browse through smaller pages.

Entries for our first group challenges are trickling in and I have created a page on the main site to showcase the winning members work.

Hope you are enjoying the very un-British weather and remembering to use lots of sun tan lotion.

Busy, busy, busy!

Phew, I just finished adding 17 wonderful website to UK Beaders and have updated the shops map with 5 more stores for you to visit!

Earlier today (OK as it's now the small hours it was technically yesterday) I posted details of our first group challenges, with a couple of wonderful UK themes.

The first was inspired by the queens 80th birthday celebration - The children's party in the palace. I watched the whole thing on TV and thought it was great fun. This theme allows lots of scope with many different creative avenues to be explored.

The other challenge is a bit more specific and involves using the colour red. Why red? Because of all the amazing British icons that are red including Routemaster buses, telephone boxes and royal mail post boxes!

Site updated - problem fixed!

Just a quick update to let you all know that I recently upgraded the site so now you will notice there are no adverts spoiling the site and getting in the way.

When you click on a link to any of the sites listed the site's address will show up in your address bar so you no longer have any problems in book marking any great sites you come across when using the UK Beaders site.