Special Feature: Twitter Contest with The Beadin' Path and My Contest Finalist Necklace

Contest? Did someone say contest?

On Tuesday I blogged about finally organizing (well, mostly) my workspace with some pictures and shared about it on Twitter, too. To share it on Twitter, in less than 140 characters, you need to convert the URL of the post, which is very long, to something as short as possible. To do that, I go to a site called Cli.gs and create a short link. Cli.gs also tracks the human clicks (discounts all 'bots) on each cli.gs link created.

When I look at the metrics for clicks on that link, I usually see that I get anywhere from 10 to 20 clicks and sometimes 30 or 40 if I'm really lucky. On Tuesday's link - over 200! (If you are back today after first visiting me via Twitter yesterday and Tuesday, thank you for returning) The point, though, is wow, people must like to see other people's studios!

Well, I was tweeting (that's what you call the messages on Twitter, by the way) about it with Heather DeSimone from The Beadin' Path (@beadinpath) and she said:

beadinpath: @AWDawno We should try to start up a #TweetYourStudio day. It could be fun. And inspiring. And scary.

That got some re-tweets and positive comments, so we are going to have a TweetYourStudio day on Monday, September 28th, on Twitter. To enter you have to do two things.

1) Go to one of the Twitter photo sharing sites (I'm familiar with yfrog and twitpic, but there may be others) and upload a photo of your studio. These sites allow you to tweet the picture and a brief caption to Twitter right from the same spot. You register there with your Twitter name and password. Signing up for Twitter is free. There may be other ways to share your pictures that those of you who are more Twitter savvy know how to do, feel free to use them.

2) In order to complete your entry, you *must* put the hashtag #TweetYourStudio in the message you tweet with your picture (or we won't be able to find it). If you don't know what that means, here's a great explanation of hashtags and how to use them.

Update from Heather on prizes! (promoted from comments)

The Beadin' Path & BeadinPath.com will be ponying up 2 $30 gift cards to The Beadin' Path or http://www.BeadinPath.com for winners in the following categories.
*Most Organized
*Most 'Holy-Cow-I-Can't-Believe-You-Get-Anything-Done-in-that-Space' Studio

Submissions are open to any artist working in any media. Just tweet your space.

Judges will be 3 BeadinPath staff'ers (but not me, sorry Tweeter friends, no favoritesies :). And we'll announce the winners on Tuesday morning here on this blog as well as on Twitter!
Submissions must use hashtag #TweetYourStudio or we won't see them.
And also - all entries must be submitted by midnight West Coast time on Monday night (we don't want to miss anyone who submits too late).

Wahoo! This will be fun!
Thanks Dawn for the superb blog!
:) Heather
The Beadin' Path

I am also offering an "honorable mention" prize for best use of a small crafting space. If you're stuck with a corner, a closet or have to do your crafts on the sofa, tweet a picture of the space in use (if you're camera shy, just show the stuff you craft with at the place you craft - you don't have to be in the picture) and use the same hashtag but mention "small space" or "sm.sp." to keep it short. I'll send the winner a special prize, something that won't take up too much space either: a Bead Buddy Dual Lap Desk.

So you have the weekend to tidy up (or not if you want to win Holy-Cow-I-Can't-Believe-You-Get-Anything-Done-in-that-Space) but post your picture and use the hashtag on Monday to enter.

Speaking of contests...

Some time ago I got the news that I was one of the ten finalists in the Step by Step Beads magazine Colorworks contest held in the Spring. The contest finalists' pieces (including mine!) will be featured in the November/December '09 issue of Step by Step Beads with comments by Margie Deeb.

I have wanted to post a picture of the necklace ever since I heard, but I'd removed one of the copper chains to use for another necklace that I sold at BayCon, because I'd run out of that chain and didn't have time to order more. I'd put the necklace aside to wait for the replacement chain. Now that I've worked my way through the organizing (mostly) of my workroom to the point where I uncovered the necklace, I could replace the missing chain and take a picture for you:

The rules for the contest were to use the green, orange and purple triad of the color wheel. I'd already started what is the top beaded strand in the first picture, with those colors, so I used that design as my starting point for the final piece.

It went through several iterations before I finished it. I wasn't sure about it having five layers, but I just wasn't happy with it and kept on adding layers, until I had five.

So, there's the necklace and its story. Hope it was worth the wait...

My apologies for not being ready to review the Wubbers yet, nor having an interview ready - I need to carve out time to do some research and email good questions to the potential interviewee - hope to do so this weekend.

See you tomorrow for my Friday Pick!

PS - Picture credit: The picture at the top of the page is in the public domain in the United States. This applies to U.S. works where the copyright has expired, often because its first publication occurred prior to January 1, 1923. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3b06083