This year was the first time I have entered The Battle of the Beadsmith and, although my piece got knocked out in the first round, I was very happy to have taken part.  It gave me the chance to make something that has been in my head for some years but that I could never justify making before as it is inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of books and therefore I would not be able to sell it due to copyright law.  I hope that Sir Terry would have approved…

For those of you not familiar with the competition, entrants have a set period of time in which to do the beadwork and then send in four photos of it, along with a short piece of writing detailing the materials used, time taken etc.  You can read mine here.  People are put into pairs to battle against each other and once the pictures have all been shown voting begins.  Whoever gets the most votes in each pair goes through to the next round, where they are paired with someone else and voting begins again, and so on until there is one winner.  There are some truly amazing entries again this year so I hope you will go along and take a look if you haven’t done so already.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing more about the process of making ‘Dreaming in Octarine’ and what it means to me.  Some bits posed quite a challenge, although I think the most stressful bit of the whole thing was taking the photos!