One of the downsides to beading is the sheer amount of time it can take to make something so unfortunately I guess many of my ideas for projects and variations will never see the light of day unless I can come up with a way to bead in my sleep.

Knowing this I especially love when someone beads a variation of one of my projects and I get to see it- all the pleasure without any of the time!

I am constantly on the look out for interesting colour combinations people do in class and store them away in the back of my mind until hopefully I'll have the time to try it myself. Also when teaching I try to encourage all manner of experimentation to see what exciting things people come up with.

Today's class, Tila Geometrics, brought me both colour and variation ideas to add to my ever-growing to-do list.

One of the colour ideas is shown here. The great thing about the two projects I teach in this class is that they are reversible or 'rotatable' so you can add extra colours in.

The variations idea came to me from my friend Dana Steen Witker who had the idea of using 2mm pearls instead of Tilas. We spent the last few days discussing if and how it would work and today she took the leap and tried it and it looks great. So good I'm stealing the idea and will be using it in a variation of a project that appears in Geometric Beadwork Volume 2.