Did you watch the live Facebook video featuring our Neon Nights beading kit? If not, be sure to check out our video replay. Our Facebook shows are great, but not everybody can join us when we go live. We always make sure our videos can be replayed and watched after the fact. We also make sure to upload videos to our YouTube channel so our viewers that do not like Facebook can still watch them in a format that is agreeable.
This week, our resident beading guru, Sara, opened one of our latest beading kits – Neon Nights. She then designed some lovely earrings and a bracelet. Sara typically designs her jewelry on the fly when she does live videos. Our biggest featured videos are unboxing videos. During these, she opens a mystery gift box from a participating bead store and proceeds to design jewelry without a clue what is in the box beforehand. It is fascinating to watch her thought process. She turns a blank canvas into a beautiful handcrafted piece of jewelry, right before the viewer’s eyes.
The Neon Nights Kit show was an exciting one for Sara. She normally designs her jewelry with very little inspiration and input but her own. This time, our friend and fellow designer, Nealay Patel, opened our Neon Nights Kits as part of a design challenge for his Tuesday Tutes videos. His video came out a day before we featured the kit on our site. Nealay is an incredibly talented jewelry designer and author. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you can find him on Facebook, his website - SilverSilk, and you can even purchase some of his books in our Books category, in our Tools and Supplies section. Any time Nealay works with beads, you can be sure his design will be out of the box and fun. His Neon Nights design was a beautiful necklace with an elaborate focal piece, he designed, at the center.
Sara was eager to get to work on her design. Lots of great ideas in her head after watching Nealay create his jewelry. Everybody at Soft Flex Company was a little inspired, in fact. Soft Flex employee James Browning created his own designs. James created a bracelet using interlaced jump rings as beads. He designed some earrings to match the bracelet. He also created a necklace using elements from the Neon Nights Kit; the necklace was a beautiful strung piece with a tassel as the focal piece.
Sara started the video showing off her brand new knitted bracelet. We have featured our knitting spools in recent shows and blogs. Be sure to check those out if you are a fan of Viking Stitch or knitted designs. Knitting spools are simple to use and create intricate and lush wire designs that you can show off with just wire or you can adorn the wire with beads as you go. She used a four pin knitting spool for her bracelet, using Style 3.
The Neon Nights Kit came with a spool of yellow Soft Flex Wire, a bag of jump rings – A LOT of jump rings, a findings kit (earring posts, toggle, and lobster clasp), a spectrum of colorful beads that fit the neon motif, tassels from Jesse James Beads, and some David Christensen cane glass beads. All of the colors in the kit are very flashy and fun. As a matter of fact, this kit is so splashy and electric; it may have even been a challenge to seasoned bead stringing designers that are accustomed to using a more muted palate. Part of the fun of stringing your jewelry is challenging yourself. You never know where your creative impulses might take you when you are working outside your comfort zone.
Sara’s first design was a beautiful bracelet. She did not conceal the yellow beading wire, but chose to incorporate that color into the design. She wove the wire around the jump rings. She added pink and black beads to the design. Simple and elegant. She followed up with earrings that would complement the bracelet design. The earrings showed off the yellow wire nicely with a pink bead near the top of the design and black beads at the base.
If you loved our Neon Nights Kit, but were not able to purchase one before they sold out, you can shop our Neon Nights Kit Category and find beads that were hand-picked to match the colors of the Neon Nights theme.
Our themed kits are a fairly new feature. We create a limited issue kit every month. We do not know what each new kit will be. It is very exciting. From month to month we get to be creative and put together a kit we feel everybody would enjoy. As beaders, ourselves, we make sure to select items that appeal to us. We don’t want to sell anything we wouldn’t buy.
Every time we feature our latest design kits on our live video shows, we offer the upcoming kit as a prize to anybody that wins our prize draw. If you do not enter the prize draw, you are not eligible to win the upcoming kit, but you can still purchase it. To enter the prize draw, viewers must post pictures of designs they created using the kit on our V.I.B. Facebook Group. So, if you are viewing a video using the Neon Nights Kit and you happen to have created a stellar piece of jewelry with the Neon Nights Kit, please post your photos and you will automatically be entered into the draw to win our upcoming kit. Make sure you post the photo before the deadline to be eligible. The names are randomly drawn. We do not want to choose favorites. That would be way too difficult; we have seen some absolutely amazing work from our followers.
All of our live shows are a great opportunity to watch an improvised design. And with any live show, there are can be issues sometimes that make things difficult. Our Neon Nights Kit show was one such show. We had a perfect mini-storm of connection problems that did not allow for us to finish the show the way we wanted to finish. But we have kept the show together in the best format we could under the circumstances. Can’t win them all, but doggone it – we are going to go for the gold every time.
Join our Facebook group – VIB. Stay in the know. Stay up to date. From our bead shows to our video shows and sales, you can stay in touch with us. The community is full of artistic and helpful beaders and crafty people. Inspire and be inspired. Share your pictures and get the beading bug from others!
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Blog contributor Thomas Soles is the Trade Show Coordinator for Soft Flex Company. His favorite stones are Lapis and Pietersite. His favorite hobby is day dreaming. And his favorite mustache is Tom Selleck's. As you can see, he has a healthy (or possibly unhealthy) sense of humor. You can write to him at Thomas@SoftFlexCompany.com