It's Day 13 of March Meet The Maker and the theme is: Feedback.

Feedback come in many forms, whether it's a review on a selling platform, sharing a photo of something done from my instructions, an email of thanks or a chat at a class. All are welcome and help me in my work and inspire me to continue.

Sometimes though feedback comes in a different way and, whilst tough at the the time, spurs me on and let's me know I'm heading on the right direction.

3 years ago I wrote a long blog post about copyright and sharing and I got literally thousands of emails and comments in response.

What was great was all the thanks and personal stories I received (you can read more in the follow-up blog posts here & here)

Sadly I also got abuse, personal insults and even lies written about me by someone well known in the bead world.

At the time it was tough and shocking to have someone libel and defame me so publicly but in the end they had to make a public apology and the fact that they had to resort to such bad behaviour in response to my blog and couldn't actually criticise what I had written was all the feedback I needed that I was heading in the right direction.

If daring to be so bold as to want to stick up for beading customers means I have to weather some stupid insults and lies then I can live with that.

In much sunnier news the weather here at the moment is lovely and spring has definitely sprung.

I'm not much of a gardener, so have to buy my flowers, but I always look forward each year to when a lone flower pokes his head through the fence from our neighbours' garden to add some sunshine to our day.