A year has passed, and Beadingschool is celebrating its first birthday this week!
It’s unbelievable how fast time passed. But after all, when I look back at all the things that happened during the past 12 months, I am so proud and happy with how much our hard-working team and our enthusiastic beaders managed to do, and I can hardly believe 12 months were enough for all these activities, jewels, and accomplishments.
Let’s look back together at the historic moments of Beadingschool’s first year!
What previously you have known as ‘The Storytelling Jeweller’ website, exactly a year ago has transformed into Beadingschool by Erika Sandor. While originally I started the blog to tell my own stories about traveling and beading, during the past 6 years it grew into so much more: an online meeting place and source of treasures for beaders who care about friendships, learning together, and playing with inspiring components and cabochons. And Beadingschool is a much more fitting name for it!
At the same time, we also grew out of the website that I put together several years ago on my own also, and since 27. April 2021 you can browse a lot nicer and faster one, also with many little features that make a beader’s life easier when hunting down interesting material.
A beautiful time of the past year was when we were learning together about Creative bead embroidery!
For me, bead embroidery is a fantastic way of letting go of rules and boundaries: every component can be used, including found objects, and every shape is possible: symmetric or asymmetrical, with negative space, in combination with metal objects or beadwoven motifs that were made separately. It was absolutely fulfilling to see your progress, and witness your joy with the new tricks that you’ve learned. If you haven’t been with us yet back then, you can find all the video classes here on the Beadingschool Youtube channel.
If you haven’t tried bead embroidery yet, you might also want to check out this extensive article about all the tools and material that you need.
As a culmination of all this learning, during the summer we organised a big beading competition, continuing the tradition started a year earlier. Our students (including Sara Lilja who made the beautiful necklace here) competed in three categories. A jury consisting of some of the best beadwork designers from all around the world (Helena Tang-Lim, Heather Kingsley-Heath, and Sian Nolan) had a very hard time choosing the winners, who received prizes not only from Beadingschool, but also from our sponsors The Beadsmith, Preciosa Crystals, and Matubo Beads.
The most important is, that all our beaders who participated did their best to show what they have learned, and felt inspired to create beautiful jewels! You can admire their creations through these links in category 1, category 2, and category 3.
In September, together with opening the doors of schools in the Northern hemisphere, the biggest beady adventure of ours started, too: the Beadingschool Academy. We explore a different source of inspiration every two months. We started with the Magic Garden theme inspired by Art Nouveau, continued with Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and with a journey to India. These days we are finishing the Art Deco theme. Tutorials, jewels, articles, but also discussions, a lunch break Zoom room for our students, and of course, a Box full of beautiful, inspiring components are all part of the experience.
Do you know where the majority of your glass beads and shiny crystals are made?
In the hearth of Central Europe, a town in the Czech republic called Jablonec. The so-called Crystal Valley was on our beady bucket list for many years already, and in the autumn, Andrea, Adam, Zuzi, and Erika (on two separate journeys) got to travel and explore not only the town rich with buildings in Art Deco style, but of course, also visited some of our partners: hard-working people from the bead making industry. We learned about the ways how beads are made, saw historical tools, got to tour a factory that felt like a treasure chest on its own, and even tasted some of the wine made in the region.
Read more about Zuzi’s and Andi’s travels here!
We are incredibly proud that in last October we could become a partner of Preciosa Crystals in bringing their shiny treasures to the creative community. It means that we are in an intensive cooperation with the headquarters in the Crystal Valley, Preciosa trusting us that we present to you their beautiful products in a way that they can be proud of. Our goal is to eventually bring you all the shapes and colors that they manufacture that are interesting for us, beaders, and today we took a big step towards this goal. Even more Preciosa crystal beads and cabochons are now available to you, and until next week’s #CoffeeTimeWithErika they can be yours for a much better price, with a significant 22% discount. It’s already valid, and is applied automatically to the products that are part of the sale.
How could I skip mentioning the Beadingschool Advent Calendar and Foxy here, who was taking care of a different gift or significant discount every day?
A wonderful opportunity to stock up on your most beloved goodies, a test for our packing team’s skills and for the website’s speed 😀 Sometimes the website crashed under the weight of all the beady enthusiasm in a matter of a few minutes, but at the end, every beader of ours could feel the joy of accumulating treasures for the whole next year! This was our second year of the Advent Calendar, but it’s definitely coming back in 2022, too: click here and sign up for the waiting list to make sure that you get a notification when you’ll have a chance to sign up again!
About a year after moving in, the original Treasury started to feel to small for all the goodies that were waiting for you. After the Advent Calendar Adventure and taking inventory at the beginning of the year, we started to look for a new, better suiting home for the shinies and our Team. Luckily, we found just a perfect place! Beadingschool is now residing at the top floor of a historic building in the town where I used to go to high school. In fact, back then there was a library in the building where I went sometimes. The new Treasury is not only more spacious, but it has an AC, and dedicated rooms for different activities: a room for the incoming packages where Timi is dividing them and taking pictures of everything before she’d upload them to the Bead Shop, another one for kits and boxes where Monika is carefully preparing the beloved collections, a room for loose beads, cabochons, and components where Noemi is the boss, and a small office to make sure that we can relax a bit, or Andrea and Erika can have one of their creative meetings cooking up new plans for the whole Beadingschool!
Through the themes of the Beadingschool Academy, you are entering a different world every two months: new inspiration, new components and beads, that are becoming artefacts on your bead mat, helping you dive into the ‘story.’ Besides the jewels and articles, there is something more that helps you to feel the atmosphere: professional storyteller Csenge is bringing us tales from all around the world, featuring gems, pearls, minerals and jewels. In February she entertained us with tales from India, and a week ago with a collection of stories from different countries, all focused on the colour red, as that’s one of the shades we were working with during the Art Deco Theme.
Introducing you Csenge and including her in creating this special experience was something that I wished for for many years. I’m so happy that you grew so fond of her, and I can’t wait to listen to her next event!
Beadingschool is about creativity, and positivity, but also about community and compassion. The beautiful beaded star that you can see here is an embodiment of the last two: designed by fellow Beadingschool Club member Mary Beth Muscatello (Sun Shyne) is one of the first designs that our talented beaders came up with, that we are helping with illustrations and the tutorial so everyone can enjoy the result. At the moment we are working on two more tutorials together with our Club members, both of them will be amazing!
Beth approached us with the idea of using the funds collected from the sale of the tutorial to donate to a charity supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom. Together, the Beadingschool Community collected 710 euros. We chose an organisation residing in Slovakia (neighbouring with Ukraine and sheltering already hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians), that is dividing the donations between 30 smaller charities, based on what’s needed the most at the moment.
I’m grateful for such a caring and giving community! After a sea turtle sanctuary and a cancer research institute this was the third organisation that we managed to help significantly.
Thanks to the new Treasury and more shiny goodies, we also need a bigger team to make sure we can make all your beading dreams come true! I feel lucky to be surrounded by hard-working, enthusiastic people, who not only do their best to make our beaders happy and make them experience Christmas with every package that we send to the world, but also support each other, embrace learning and growing, and celebrate each other’s successes and happiness.
Thank you, dear Team, for all you do for Beadingschool! Each and every one of you are important and contributes to the happiness that Beadingschool is spreading around the world: sometimes to neighbouring countries, and sometimes as far as India, the Philippines, or South Africa.
Recently, we started to work closer with the Beadworker’s Guild. Sharing the same values, doing our best to spread inspiration, the love of beading, and bringing all beadworker’s from around the world together, but also the super nice people that I got to know thanks to the Guild makes this cooperation so fun and fruitful!
I was for years already an ambassador of International Beading Week organised by the Guild (in fact, the first permanent ambassador), and thanks to the Guild I just got back to publishing again. The Anthea necklace from the springtime issue being the ‘cover girl’ for the first time in my life 🙂 I can promise, that Anthea won’t be the only project from Beadingschool that appears in the Journal this year, and I’m very excited about this years International Beading Week, too!
During the whole year, I managed to continue with the #NoOneHasToBeadAlone classes, and even if I left this to the very end, I regard this as possibly one of the biggest accomplishments of the past 12 months. I started #NoOneHasToBeadAlone in March 2020, when suddenly the whole world had to experience loneliness, fear, and isolation. As someone who has a life-long experience of fight for mental health, working hard day by day to feel happy and whole, I felt that it can be my social contribution during these trying times. Seeing the value that it brings to others, I continued doing it even after restrictions eased, and I will continue as long as I can.
Today, you can browse over 80 tutorials that I’ve designed for our Friday classes, and there are numerous #Clubdesigns articles waiting for you celebrating the creativity of the Beadingschool Club during these workshops.
Now, you are probably asking: what’s next for Beadingschool?
And I can say: there’s a lot more coming! Thank you for all your support and kindness towards us and each other during this past year. We promise to continue spreading the love of beadwork, bringing you ideas and inspiration, and to be here when you have any questions and need a helping hand when you work on your new jewel.
Wishing you all happy beading:
Erika and the Beadingschool Team
Truly a beautiful article, Erika! It refreshes what I knew and fills in the gaps of what I did not.
Your live for the people, your community and beading shines through. I am in awe of people who give so much and proud to be a part of this group. Thank you for everything!
Thank you for your kind words, Neeti! We all are very happy and thankful for being able to take this journey, grow and meet new wonderful people. Thank you for being and beading with us, it’s pure joy 🙂