Hello, Blogosphere; Goodbye, 2010

I have been thinking seriously of starting a blog for six months, ever since I got seriously into beading over the past year or so. I envisioned my first post as "What I did over summer vacation,"accompanied by a photo of a peyote stitch beadwork bracelet I made while at family camp in the Adirondacks. I still don't have a photo of the bracelet, so that post will have to wait.

The fall passed in a blur of vague ambitions as I continued to weave more beads into jewelry and thought about trying to sell the pieces but made no concrete plans. In mid-December, my office had an arts and crafts show, where some people displayed handiwork (knitting, photography) and others sold items. I made a number of sales--my first experience at selling my jewelry--and was ecstatic. On that rush of artistic validation, I started making ambitious plans for my week off between Christmas and New Year's. Launch an ArtFire store. Start that blog. Take some of my finished jewelry pieces to a local arts cooperative to see if they would be interested in selling them. Oh, and the biggie: Clean up my home office so that it can operate as a beading studio.

Any one of these projects would have been ambitious on its own, especially since all were competing with the vet appointments and other errands I'd also planned for this week off. Thus, it's not surprising that all are in a state of half-doneness. But I was determined to get the blog up and running before the calendar turned to 2011 so that this would not wind up looking like a New Year's resolution. I set up the Blogger account yesterday and could have posted something then, but New Year's Eve seemed appropriately celebratory. The blog design is just a barren template at this point, void of photos, gadgets, widgets, buttons and other gewgaws, but those will come in time.

So with less than 12 hours left in 2010, I get to check one item off my to-do list, as I hit the "publish" button and launch Torque Story--for now,  my own private blog party.