Ever since I started beading, I have tried to always keep hold of my samples so I can go back to them at a later date if I need to.

A lot of these have been photographed and documented when I added the series section to my website but of course I have 100s more of them.

I keep them all in little bead bags, stuck onto cardboard and then in box files.

These are not only interesting to go back to but useful in many ways.

If I'm ever feeling uninspired, but want to bead something, I get these out. Pretty soon I find something I never pursued, maybe because of time or it didn't fit a need I had at the time but looking at it through fresh eyesoften means I can use it in a different way.

I will be teaching in New York in November (I'll add the details to my classes page soon) and the Bead Society asked if I could do a class which involved colour in someway- well, seeing as I'm currently absorbed by my colour challenge this was right up my street!

But what to teach? Well, I knew I wanted it to be something quick or made of small components so people would have time to actually bead enough to see the fruits of their colour experiments.

But it also had to be worthwhile- I was not planning on just making people bead a useless sample which they would only look at on that day and never again- and which made no sense without being able to be compared to what everyone else in the class did.

So, after much pondering I knew I wanted to do beaded beads so thought of my brick-stitch geometric ones. But I wasn't happy with this. A lot of people don't like brick-stitch and  then I remembered...

I had originally done these in peyote stitch...

So out came the samples box and there were my old samples, sitting there waiting for me to come back to them and start again where I left off.

So now I'm busy beading these in lots of different colour ways so I have lots of samples to show on the day.