An honor to be nominated, and a tribute to my nominator

(Mandy of Beads for Brains' Blogger
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Recently, Mandy of Beads for Brains nominated me for the One Lovely Blog Award!

I was both honored and flattered to be recognized by her, and to be included among the creative and talented bloggers she gave a shout-out to.

Because this award is similar to the Kreativ Blogger Award in which I already shared seven random facts about myself, I'm going to hijack the award rules and instead list seven awesome things about Mandy:

1. She and I have never met in person, but she exudes such warmth and humor through her blog that I feel I know her.

2.  I learned about her 365-day project (in which she took on the challenge of trying a new bead project every day) from some other beading site, when she was at about day 60, and I was so intrigued by it that over the course of a couple weeks, I back-read her posts all the way to the blog's inception.

3. What I liked about her blog was that at first she was a newbie like me, so I could relate to her experimentation. But within weeks she far, far surpassed my ability. She is a poster child for how accomplished a person can become through sheer practice and diligence!

4. Her relentless online search for beading patterns has taken all over the world, where she has promoted the work of bead artists from Russia, Hungary, France, Italy and elsewhere. Thanks to her, I installed Google Chrome on my computer so that I could read the (amusingly wonky) translations of these patterns. And she taught me that with a good schematic, words aren't that important.

5. Through her, I discovered a number of great beader-bloggers, such as Sally of Wild Sally Road, as well as some non-beading blogs, like Clutter-Busting. (Unfortunately, just reading a blog does not put stuff away. Still working on that one. But this post is about her, not me.)

6. A few months ago, she published her first pattern--in Bead & Button, no less!

7. A rough patch about a year ago has prevented Mandy from finishing her project in 365 consecutive days, but she is continuing her beading journey on her own schedule, and I continue to look forward to every installment. I hope she knows that there is an army of beader-bloggers out there cheering her on to the finish line.