Sock Monkeys!

I love sock monkeys and earlier this summer I had the opportunity to come across Dulce, the owner of The Monkey Shop. She makes the greatest sock monkeys! She even named one after my daughter Guenevere.

Today she was featured on a local tv station on a program called 8WEst. Here is a link to the segment:
http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/eightwest/Sock_Monkeys_make_a_comeback


She also took a basket with items from the Etsy West Michigan team and you can see my offering of a Flower Folk if you look carefully :-)

You can see The Monkey Shop here: www.themonkeyshop.etsy.com
enjoy!

Taking a short break

Thanks everyone for visiting.
The Beads of my Life will be taking a short break while I work on my HTML skills and reorganize and inventory my entire crafting studio.

Things will be back up and normal (well as normal as I can get!) when things are less crazy

Thanks you for following me and I will be back soon!

Laurie

Beads and Kids 2

It is interesting taking kids shopping to buy beads. My daughter is very girly and as expected goes for the "girl" colors and sparkle. My son, on the other hand.... He actually has a very good eye for color and design. And he has expensive taste in Beads! When he is designing something, it has to be perfect - so he must have exactly "This" bead. After this project I had to impose a spending limit on his beads.

The blue and yellow beads are "perfect" for his necklace, but also the most expensive part! I was lucky in that the store was having a "sale" but this was the High-End bead store in town.

When taking your kids to shop for beads, you can really see their personalities. My son tends to show his team spirit (see above: Go Michigan!) but is also very bold and adventurous in his color and pattern choices.

Give your kids the chance to explore their creativity. You can do it inexpensivly by going to Hobby Lobby or Michaels and getting one of their big buckets of plastic beads (even cheaper if you use one of the store coupons) or even just letting them choose some of the current sale items. You can string on Yarn, dental floss or any of the Bead stringing choices. This is a great activity to promote fine motor skills as well.

Be creative and let the kids show you what they can do!

Beads and Kids

Things have been very interesting around here the past few days. My daughter just turned 7 and we had a slumber party for her this weekend. One of the activities we was making simple memory wire necklaces. Here are our supplies.

The girls had a lot of fun and took some time to put their designs together. Here are the finished projects.

Each girl had her own design and it didn't seem like anyone was trying to "copy" the others. It was lots of fun for them and they really enjoyed it. It seems like not enough children get exposed to being creative. We have computers, video games, and TV's that suck them in. It is really nice to see kids willing to sit a spell and just make something with no external stimulus. All I did for this project was provide the beads and finish the ends - the girls did the rest.

You can do any number of beading projects with kids for little money. Hobby Lobby and Michaels both have frequent coupons and Hobby Lobby has inexpensive beads frequently discounted every week. You can use wire, shoelaces, fishing line, yarn or actual beading string! Be creative - Let the kids be creative and you will have lots of fun!

Looking around I see that everyone has a way they view their life, well... I can tell you all about the different stages of my life by the beads that were and are part of it. As a young person - It was all about the plastic beads -those fantastic bags of mixed beads that are a treasure trove. Then as a young teen - specific plastic beads -I was very fond of the fancy faceted drops. Then I discovered glass beads! I still have beads in my collection from a trip I took to northern NM (Santa Fe maybe...) It took me almost 20 years to come up with a good design to use them in. In my 20's I discovered lampwork beads, then polymer clay, crystal and now PMC and Felt beads. My current projects include hand cast pewter charms, felted beads, swarovski and even trying to make my own polymer art beads.

Thanks for joining me on this journey and I hope to share with you - and learn from you too.

Laurie