7th Bead Soup Blog Party - Mark your calendar

Today Lori Anderson announced the date for the 7th Bead Soup Blog Party. Lori organizes these parties twice a year and as the number of participants have grown with each party, now we have three reveal days.

I must say that no matter whether you are an amateur beader or a seasoned one, you don't want to miss these parties. I have participated in three of them and trust me I have learnt a lot each time. The best part is to be able to connect with such amazing and creative people from all over the world.

You can find out more details on the party here.

And you can see below what I made for the ones I attended.
February 2011 (3rd BSBP)
September 2011 (4th BSBP) - this one was special. I missed the sign up window for the party and Lori was kind enough to send me a soup herself.
March 2012 (5th BSBP)
August 2012 (6th BSBP)

So mark your calendar and don't miss out on a wonderful opportunity to enrich yourself as a beader.

Giveaways for Intel WIN Conference

Around 6 weeks back, I got the big task to create participant giveaways for Women @ Intel Network (WIN) annual conference.The theme for the conference being 'Collaboration and Winning Together', the idea was to collaborate with Intel artists and create different from regular giveaways. 

The challenge was the budget per participant was very minimal and there were few hundred pieces to make. Me along with two other Intel artists took the challenge and put our creative heads together to come up with three giveaways and when I presented the samples to the planning committee everybody simply loved it :)

I decided to make cute little bookmark with beads in Intel blue and white colors, Jennifer Grimes made soapmallows - handmade soap in mashmallow shape too hard to resist eating them :) and Frank Krause made greeting cards with his original photographs.

Making few hundred pieces was not easy but I am blessed to have very supportive family and friends who helped me at each step...from shopping for beads and packing supplies, getting the bead danglers ready, designing the new logo to capturing each stage in pictures. Here are some of them for you to see how the bookmarks came up.

 

    

 

Today was the conference and the participants just loved the giveaways. We ran out of them very fast and people who came later were disappointed to miss them. We had a very successful conference overall and I am already looking forward to the event next year.