Below are a selection of those pictures that I took during the day

This annual event organised by Tuffnell Glass and Totally Beads is held at Towcester racecourse in the Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet like minded people, have a curry, and a darn good time… roll on next year!

If you would like to use any of the pictures please ask first.

We just have to wait for the printers (M R Printers of Horsham) to run off the 300 or so copies that we need, so I can then post off the members’ copies to them.

It’s been an “interesting” experience, but one that I have enjoyed. I really quite like playing around with design tools. There are so many ways you can do it, and you could spend years tweeking things trying to get them just right, but at the end of the day you need to stop and hand the darn thing over.

Well… I don’t think I will be doing next year’s but I do hope you all enjoy looking at this edition… Happy reading.

Well all the pictures were in during December 2009 and I started on the main layout… All was going well, then Christmas hit! and January was a complete washout from an ability to work on the Journal point of view (for various reasons). So the upshot is, I have just started working on it again.

There is probably about 3-4 days more work to do, and then it can be handed over to the printers. Woo hoo

To whet your appetite, this edition has 80 (yes eight zero) artists’ work this time with some 230 pictures of beads and will be a 52 page A4 book. Please bear with me on this, but you will get your copies, they will be mailed out to you all as soon as I get them back from the printers.

Stay tuned !!

The final push was to sort out some discrepancies in the look and feel. (I’m sure there are some more), and also to make the site a bit easier to navigate.

More Pages will be added in the next few weeks, for starters we need a “How to do it” page, and a “What is Lampworking” page, so that should keep us busy for the next few weeks.

Depending on when you look at it it will be either the old or the new site, If it doesn’t look like this picture, then it is the old one.

I will make sure the old pages link to the new ones with some dodgy mod-rewrite rules, so all the old links and google cache should be fine and updated.

The whole site will be run from WordPress with my own custom theme. Therefore because its WordPress its all XHTML compliant with as much semantic markup as I can manage and all styling is CSS… I’m sure that there are some incompatibilities with some very old browsers, but it works fine in IE5.5, 6 Firefox and Opera.

One advantage of using WordPress is that I can let some of the committee members post news items themselves, and update any pages that they own (ie tuition pages)

But on that… that’s one thing that I find a bit anyoying about WordPress “as it comes”, is that I cannot set up a page to be editable by another user… posts yes but not pages (If you are allowed to edit pages then you can also create new ones… and I don’t want that). Therefore I will need to write a plugin to do it, which is something that I really like about WordPress…!!!

To be honest though, the site will probably not be up for another week, as I also have a very hectic schedule this week mixing and producing a CD with my wife which is booked in for mastering at Cyclone Music Productions next Wednesday. It has to be mastered by then because we need the CD run to be available for sale by the middle of March. (More on that when I have finished mixing it)
Too much to do… and not enough time.

Silver Lemon Designs by Sarah Downton

Also see Glass bead makers UK for more information on glass bead making.