Time for a change.

Here at The Bead Shed we are really excited to share our new plans for the future.

I (Sooz) loves to teach, I trained years ago as a Teaching Assistant and have also done Adult Education in community establishments and colleges.  When The Bead Shed shop and glassworkshop was open, I was able to sell beads, talk beads and teach beadmaking, glass melting and other crafty things.

After having a really long break and lots and lots of time in the new wooden Bead Shed, we feel it's time now to relaunch the learning side.  We have come up with a 3 Stage plan to enable us to do this.

Stage 1:
I have a brick build "play room", or studio as I prefer to call it (sounds much posher don't you think) In this studio I have 2 torches set up, my kilns, and absolutely no room to work as I am very messy and leave things laying about EVERYWHERE.  Whenever I get the urge to go and play with glass, I think about the hour I need to spend tidying up before I can get in there, and the urge disappears.

So, the challenge is to strip everything out, yes EVERYTHING, and put back just the glass stuff.  So the boxes of other crafts that I have collected like Polymer Clay, Silver Clay, Enamelling, (that can be counted as glassy I think), china painting, glass painting, pewter melting, resin, colour melt crystals - and so the list goes on, will be packed... em.... somewhere else.  (more about that in Stage 3)

From here, the brick shed will be spruced up, and re-jigged.  The aim is to make this a glass teaching studio for glass bead making (lampworking).

Stage 2:
As we had a shop you can imagine we have lots and lots of stock, to date we have 1137 lines in our eBay shop!
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Bead-Shed

Yes, 1137, and I am ashamed to say that's probably only about 2/3rd's of the stock we actually do have.  There are boxes and bags of beads uncounted and unsorted and not yet up for sale.  Shame on us!

So, the plan here is to condense those lines quite drastically, the prices we will be able to offer in our sale should be good, as stock was bought when the £1 was better against the $.  Keep an eye out for items coming on sale very soon.  We estimate Stage 2 will take AT LEAST a year to complete.

Stage 3:
The teaching studio.  Once Stage 2 is complete, or even well underway, we can free up a lot of space in the big wooden shed, which in all honesty is more like a log cabin.  There are two large workshop tables in there already (covered with bags of beads) it is carpeted (covered with bags of beads) and has good lighting (the beads have not quite reached that high yet).  Once the lines are condensed, we should be able to keep the stock on one long wall, which leaves the rest of the space free to teach beading and other crafts.  I still have all the workshop lists from when we had the shop, so will be able to offer a large range of different crafts.

So, that's our news,  we started work on Stage 1 yesterday, I will blog and share pictures as we go.

Oh, if you want to follow updates on Twitter, the name is - soozintheshed.