Lost - Jan 14th 2009

Ok I haven't been around for a while, quite a while actually!!

There's been lots of family stuff going on, my youngest daughter started school and I felt slightly abandoned, very sadly my Grandfather died, which was more of a blow than I'd expected, and then there was Christmas..........

But something else was niggling me all along really, where am I going with the bead making lark? I'm quite an internet junkie, and unsurpizingly I stalk, and I mean 'stalk' all things glassy on the net, particularly lampwork beads, as I've done even before I started lampworking myself. But this continuing habit sent me head long in to something of a quandry, I completely lost sight of what I was trying to do, I was lost, in other peoples beads! I started to feel that everything I was making was rather too 'inspired' and doubted how much of it had actually come from me, and how much I'd subconsciously 'copied', my mind was so full of all those 'WOW' images.

So I took a break, the new year has found me back at the torch and I now feel I'm on my own road again.........phew!!

I recently posted a thread about my experience on Frit Happens (an open internet forum frequented by lampworkers and jewellery designers) and to my surprise there were many other lampworkers who'd found themselves in a similar situation at some point in their bead making career. The general consensus seemed to be, that looking at other peoples work is good in some ways, it raises your game, and can be genuinely inspiring, but on the other hand it can send on a path where you'r unintentionally chasing somebody elses style, and you can also find yourself suffering from a touch of the old 'Bead Envy' too, all very bad for the mojo.

I love the internet, but I've learnt that I need to curb my own obsession for lampwork beads in order to be genuinely creative myself.

So here I go, it's been tough not ogling everyone's gorgeous beads, but it's just so bad for my mojo, so I'm limiting myself to once a week ;-) let's see how I go on!