Saturday at the Bead & Button Show

On Saturday, I started my morning with a breakfast meeting at the Hilton.  I was getting together with 13 other bead shop owners.  We all belong to a group called the Local Bead Store Alliance - an international organization of beadshop owners from Canada and the US.  It is always a good time when we have a rare chance to share time together, and the Bead & Button Show is one of the times when several members are in a single location.  I was delighted to see so many friends, but I had to leave early because I had class for the day. 

My class was on Advanced Photopolymer Plate Techniques and it was outstanding.  I own a very fancy piece of equipment that I had purchased from the teacher last year at Metal Clay World, and I wanted to play a bit under more knowledgeable eyes.  By the end of the day I had made several plates, ruined a couple of them but learned why/how, and determined that my old version of Adobe Illustrator won't work as well for this, so I need to look into upgrading to the newer version that Adobe just introduced.  ( more money that I don't have)  This technique will allow me to make my chop so that I can mark my projects easier, and it will also allow me to customize some of my metal clay projects with Sindarin sayings and unique alphabets.  It's just exactly what I wanted! 

I had lunch with my roomie, Dawn, and a good friend Mary Kay Kare.  It was a great choice, since it we hadn't had lunch together we would probably have shopped and spent more money that we didn't have :-)  It's always a great joy meeting old friends when I attend Bead & Button Show.  It's one of the best things ever.  After class I dropped my things off at my room, walked back to the Hilton again for another vendor get-together, and finally called it a day by sharing a long, relaxing dinner at Thai Palace with Dawn.  Then we got a drink at the bar and packed, preparing to check out early the next morning.  Tomorrow's post will end my Bead & Button Show report, talking about my last class and the trip home.