My Bead Blog Dilemma
So I’m one of the owners of The Beadin’ Path and I was asked to do some blogging on beads on www.beadinpath.com. Sounds easy, right? If you have me standing in front of you wearing but one bead, I can wax philosophic for hours, maybe days about the virtues of that bead, where it is from, who made it, why, the historical importance of that one bead, and so on. Ask me to commit to a bead blog once a week, and I can’t focus. My mind floods with the potential article topics. So I need some help & guidance from you: you who read blogs on BeadinPath.com. What should I write about?

I’ve gone from ‘Daily Ramblings of a Bead Store Owner’ where I would pretty much blog about my day to day routines: ordering, incoming stock, beads that just came in that I love-but-don’t-ever-have-time-to-bead-with. Also this would include the nitty-gritty of the bead business: pulling together our class schedule mailer, hiring new staff, getting ready to head out to bead shows, that sort of thing.

SpongeBob & Fancy Feast
Then I thought, Well I have a big following here that is (let’s face it) mostly women. Mothers. They can relate to my daily balancing act of trying to find time to blog when faced with the challenge of having SpongeBob SquarePants babysit my 5 year old while my 8 month old decides to paint the kitchen floor and the cat with the cats’ Fancy Feast. (Yes, this was what was going on this morning as I tried to catch up on my emails). These daily musings would be really fun for me to write about. But not too easy to always bring back to the topic at hand: beads and beading.

And then I have this folder called “blog ideas”. It is chock full of all of these GREAT article ideas that would create various bead resources that we’re all always trying to track down. Like a glossary of glass bead finishes (i.e. what is an AB finish? What is a 2X finish, how about silver luster?). However when I sat down to write this, it turned into a chart. Then I decided I’d have to add graphics for EVERY finish to full illustrate what it looked like. This is the web after all. I can’t rely on my text descriptions when pulling together a glossary. But this glossary has become the bane of my existence. I can’t finish it. I still aspire to, but I’m too busy figuring out how to keep my 8 month old from pulling fistfuls of the cats’ hair out while I take 5 minutes at the laptop on my kitchen counter.

Ah, poor me! Actually, I love my life. I do face the age-old challenge of balancing it all, as women have done over the ages. But I get the best of both worlds. When I leave my kids at home with a sitter to go to work, I get to be surrounded by beads & people who love them! And when I come home, I have these two smart little gorgeous-faced boys who are excited to see me. But as you can see from the rambling of this blog itself, I’m easily distracted. I was told it came with giving birth… and it did.

Send Help!
So PLEASE: help me solve my bead blog dilemma and tell me what you want to read! I would love for you to email me. I will do my best to focus my future ramblings toward what you’re looking to read about. Do you want info on beads? Bead patterns and tutorials? Bead ramblings? Contests? Bead Trivia? Do you really want a 7 page chart on glass bead finishes? If so, I’ll wind it up and post it, I promise!