A Giveaway and a Muffin Tin Challenge

I just might be joining in Heather Powers Muffin Tin Challenge.

Maybe.

Possibly.

If I do, this MIGHT be the tin I use. These MIGHT be the projects I finally get done.

Maybe.

If you are taking part in Heather's challenge, you know what I'm talking about. If you aren't participating, well, you might...read about it here.

The general idea is that you fill up a muffin tin with all the things you need to complete various projects and then just SIT DOWN AND DO IT. No distractions.

What a concept!

My twist? These are almost-done projects or sketches of beady projects that aren't done...or aren't even started. Some are parts of projects for books or magazines that I took apart after they were made to repurpose the parts. Some are things that just didn't work the way I wanted them to. Some are for me personally, some are for friends, some are for the blog or a tutorial. No matter what, they aren't done and should be.

Wow, I kinda sound like I AM doing this.

Hop on over to Heather's blog (here) to read about the challenge and join in. Want to win something? Share a few words about ONE PROJECT you need to complete in the comments down below and you could win one of our Inspiration Bags. These are $9 collections of beads, findings, half-made samples and etc. that we sell at the shop. See, that's what I usually do with my muffin tin cups full of almost projects, I just bag them up and hope they inspire someone else...

Art Bead Scene Monthly Challenge for November

A print of this painting hung in my elementary school. I remember it clearly. The print was a bit washed out, it probably dated from when the school was built (in the late 50's or very early 60's) and to my 1975 eyes it was faded. I really loved the fruit, though, and remember staring at the way Cezanne had painted them to suggest the shading and the roundness. I learned a lot from that print, and the Cezanne Room at Arles print that hung in a different hallway.

Considering how much I remember this print, I am guessing it was in the hall to the lunch room? Or maybe outside the bathroom?

This is also the inspiration image for the Art Bead Scene challenge for this month. This is monthly contest that encourages readers to create a piece of jewelry based on an exemplar image. Winners get lots of art bead goodies. The contest closes at the end of each month. You should enter. Yes, I know it's the 22nd. Well, sometimes it's good to work under pressure, isn't it?

If you haven't tried the challenge, or if you want to know more, visit the Art Bead Scene here.

Vote for our Staff Challenge entries!

We have occasional staff challenges here. They are always crafty (we've never had a foosball challenge, or a cooking challenge) and they are always fun. Sometimes we have a specific item that has to  be incorporated into the project, some times we have a theme, sometimes we have a color palette. 

This month, we had a word. The word was 'bedizen.'

Years ago, before there was an Ornamentea, there was a company called Bedizen Ornaments. I started it in my kitchen, making jewelry for a local boutique and lamp shades for an interior designer. I started doing wholesale shows, then hired some handy folks to help me, then sold designs to Anthropologie and other large chains, then enticed my husband to quit his job and work with beads. He helped me to create Ornamentea, and the business shifted a bit. We stopped making jewelry for catalogs and department stores. We started teaching classes and selling just the ingredients. That word, 'bedizen' was the name I chose for the business way-back-when as I didn't know how else to unite jewelry and lampshades, and I liked the fact that there was a 'z' in the word, and I liked that it had a vague meaning to most people. When we moved the business from making jewelry (we abandoned the lamp shades very early!) to selling the parts, we kept the Bedizen name as our 'official' incorporated name.

So, there's that. And there's that word. 

Bedizen.

The photos below are how five staff members interpreted the word. There is a lot on the line; the winner gets to have me work for them for a whole day, plus SERIOUS bragging rights with their co-workers. Also, I will probably take everyone out for drinks at the winner's choice of watering hole. Shh, they don't know that last part! 

You need to help us out by voting. Just click on the # of your favorite project in the column on the right hand side. It's easy. You can also share this with your friends and family and get them to vote. The winner will thank you. 

#1 one features a hand-made silver wire chain with Swarovski crystals. The pendant elements are custom-cut lucite with decopaged images from the crown jewels of some fancy country. 

#2 features a soldered central glass bevel, tab-set in copper, with dried dogwood flower, hammered and formed copper wire 'petals' around the central element and a red silk duiponi ribbon necklace. 

#3 features detailed micro-macrame strands mixed with trade beads, glass pearls, wood and chain links in a multi-strand style.

#4 features a triple strand of chain, ball-chain and hand-knotted neon pearls with hammered jump rings and a glass-bottle pendant holding a suspended elephant charm.

#5 features a felted and embellished doll with coiled-wire crown, beaded accents, tiered ribbon skirt and a floral beaded strap handle. 

Voting will continue through midnight, October 31st. Winner will be announced via our newsletter. 

Subscribe to the newsletter here so you don't miss a thing. 

How to choose a contest winner

We just had a fun contest on our site where we encouraged folks to vote on their choice of glazes for an Elaine Ray bead (the lighter one won, but not by much!) The winner received the beads shown, shipped by us. To enter, participants were required to SHARE the image on facebook, COMMENT on the original blog post, RETWEET the contest tweets or PIN the image on Pinterest. Participants could enter as many times as they liked.

There are approximately a zillion apps and services that 'manage' contests like this for sites and blogs, but they all charge some kind of fee or they collect participants info. I don't want to pay fees for fun contests, and I don't want my customers to have to 'pay' the fee of selling their info, so I run the contests myself. I get a lot of questions about how we pick winners, so here is my kinda-taped-together method. It is fair, in that the final number is randomly chosen and easy, in that I don't do a bunch of list-making and checking and double-checking.

1. Post the contest and the rules on the desired sites. Number the sites posted (in this case, FB was #1, the blog was #2, Twitter was #3 and Pinterest was #4.)

2.Check back throughout the contest to say 'hi' to the entries, or approve blog comments, or whatever. Get excited.

3.When the contest closes go to each site in order and count up the entries. In the case of Facebook, we count 'share's only, and FB gives me a total. With the other sites I actually have to count them. Whew. This is exhausting. Make a list. Mine looked like this:

Facebook 125
Blog 32
Twitter 1 (what!!!)
Pinterest 17

Not such great numbers, but that's okay. Read #3 below to see why that didn't matter this time.

4.Total your numbers up and then visit Random.org or another similar site to choose a random number. Go to the entry with that number and alert the winner. For us, the entries were numbered:

Facebook 1-125
Blog 126-157
Twitter 158
Pinterest 159-175

5. Verify your winner. I checked to see that the winner had actually SHARED the image (and not removed it already!) and that they weren't an Ornamentea staff member OR Elaine Ray, as she wasn't allowed to win. Then I notified the winner. Fun!

More tips on running contests on your blog or site:
1.Make the contest entry easy and public. By requiring people to SHARE, TWEET, PIN or COMMENT to enter it is easy to see that they did. Also, this does serve to pass the word on about the contest to others (especially the first 3!)

2.Make the contest quick. I think contests loose momentum after more than 3 days, so I generally just run them for 3 days or so. This also means you have a smaller pool of potential winners, but that might be okay.

3.Decide what you want from the contest. In the case of the Elaine Ray Which Orange Do You Choose contest we really did want to know which glaze folks preferred. That's why we let participants enter in all the different social media sites. We could have chosen to only allow SHARES and increased our Facebook traffic, or only PINS and increased our Pinterest traffic, but this was really about knowing which glaze Elaine should make.

4.Embrace lazy.My super-lazy-girl's tip: verify stuff after you choose the winner. In some cases, I have to throw out that number and get Random.org to pick me another, but I really don't want to spend all day verifying 175 entries. I just don't have time. If you know much about math (which I don't) or you live with a statistician (which I DO!) you know that a random number is just that, RANDOM. Every number has the same chance of being picked. Throwing out the first winner for disqualification doesn't make the second any less random and it saves me time. If this is interesting to you, read up on randomness at Random.org.

Wellness Words Challenge

If you like words on jewelry, or inspirational jewelry, you'll want to watch the reveal day of this blog challenge from Tracy Statler. The reveal date is February 2nd and I can't wait to see what fabulous projects the participants post. Bookmark Tracy's blog (click that picture above!) and stop back on the 2nd.