This is this week’s Jewelry Making Professor Member’s update discussing beading videos and other topics.
Jewelry Making Professor’s New Beading Videos
This week Gina introduces one of our new beading videos from Meg McBrearty showing how to make a pair of Whimsical Woodland earrings, and also introduces next week’s jewelry making video which will show a bead crochet pattern.
Gina also talks about our new contest in the forums and we discuss more about our Let’s Get Social contest.
See you next week!
Jewelry Making Professor video discussing this week’s beading videos
Brett: Hi everybody! This is Brett. I’m here with…
Gina: Gina.
Brett: Yeah, and Happy New Year!
Gina: Happy New Year!
Brett: Yeah.
Gina: Yay!
Brett: So here we are in 2012. Another great year to learn jewelry making, beading and whatever else is it that you want to learn, so we’re very excited.
Gina: Yup, I am.
Brett: We’re looking forward to a great year. So we have lots of content, lots of new instructors, lots of everything exciting.
Gina: Absolutely!
Brett: That’s great.
Gina: Very cool.
Brett: So as we always do, we’re going to start with new members.
Gina: Welcome to the family.
Brett: Yeah. So, certainly we are happy to have you if you haven’t already, please go to the forum and introduce yourself. We love to have new people contributing to the forum.
Gina: Uh-hmm.
Brett: Lots of things going on there which we’ll talk about later.
Gina: Absolutely, yeah.
Brett: But first let’s talk about this week’s new beading videos.
Gina: Well, what has become my new favorite pair of earrings — because I’m wearing them, is the new video from Meg McBrearty is the Whimsical Woodland I believe they are called. A really fun pair of earrings using the spiral stitch and they work up pretty fast, fun earrings so that’s one of the beading videos for this week.
Brett: And you get to use Farfalle beads.
Gina: Farfalle yes which we had fun saying last week. And I’m sure we’ll see more Farfalle beads in some –
Brett: Or we usually say peanut beads.
Gina: Or peanut beads, exactly, whatever your desire is. So that’s this week and next week another really cool beading videos project from Meg. Again it is — let me see if I can remember the name of it. It is a braided ribbon necklace and this is a really cool project because she is using fiber ribbon and beads and she’s crocheting, so it is a bead crochet project and it’s a really good simple project that works up quickly if you just want to learn the basics of bead crochet, it’s just –
Brett: Now, do you have to already know how to crochet to do this?
Gina: Not necessarily. It’s a good way to actually get into and introduce yourself into the bead crochet. You do use a crochet hook or needle. It is just a chain stitch which is your basic stitch, and Meg will show you how to do it as well and she’s using a ribbon and very large beads. I believe they are a size 8. And be so consistent with your stitching so you can really just focus on learning the chain stitch part of it because one of the key things when you get in to more advanced projects of bead crochet — say that 10 times fast.
Brett: Okay.
Gina: No, I don’t recommend it — is they say that the tension and consistency of tension is really important. With this project you don’t have to be so focused on that and it’s a really pretty necklace and a fun project to do so…
Brett: Cool!
Gina: So that’s coming up next week.
Brett: Okay.
Gina: And — yeah!
Brett: Forum.
Gina: Forum!
Brett: What’s going on in the forum?
Gina: Well, we have had lots of entries or starting to get lots of entries into the member’s masterpiece for the contest we’re starting to run. So the cutoff date for our first week is Saturday.
Brett: This coming Saturday at midnight.
Gina: Right.
Brett: If they’re one minute passed, too bad.
Gina: Sorry, you go into the next week.
Brett: Yeah. We’ll be a little lenient with that so…
Gina: I know, yeah.
Brett: We’ll say around Saturday night at midnight.
Gina: Yeah, because I won’t be up waiting for it.
Brett: Give or take a few hours.
Gina: Right, right.
Brett: Okay.
Gina: So we’ve had a few really good entries, very exciting. Thank you so much. But you still have time to post your picture in the forum, the member’s masterpiece for the contest.
Brett: Three to four days?
Gina: Yes.
Brett: Okay.
Gina: Yeah, so…
Brett: Now, there had been some technical challenges.
Gina: There have been.
Brett: Which have been what? What happened?
Gina: Well, just being able to download a photograph into the forum.
Brett: Or we should say upload.
Gina: Or upload, yeah, into the forum and then you know having a problem with the link being broken or the sizing has been an issue, and some members have tried to help on other members out which has been wonderful. That’s why I love the forum. It is the community of people helping each other out. But yeah, there has been some technical difficulties so…
Brett: So, how are we going to address that? What I will do in the next day or two is just go out and use the program that you like which is called Picasa.
Gina: Picasa, uh-hmm.
Brett: It used to be a separate company, bought by Google but it’s a program that can be downloaded for free, correct?
Gina: Yeah.
Brett: Onto Windows based computers. If you have an Apple computer, I assume they already have a lot of different software on there.
Gina: They usually do.
Brett: But there’s a couple of things we have to do. One, you won’t be able to upload a picture if it’s over a megabyte size. Now that’s a very big picture.
Gina: That’s large.
Brett: But if you don’t check that you may end up seeing that, “Hey it didn’t make it.” And usually that’s the reason. The other thing is, is we want the dimensions of the photograph to be right-sized for the forum.
Gina: Right.
Brett: So the problem is a lot of times when you take a photograph, you don’t know what the dimensions are, right? So, what I’m going to make a tutorial of is — but first I have to learn Picasa. I’m assuming it’s easy because you told me it was.
Gina: If I can do it Brett, you can do it.
Brett: Yeah. So what do you once you’ve taken the photograph, you have the image, you put it on your laptop. Now, how are you going to get it to the right size before you upload it into the forum, right?
Gina: Uh-hmm.
Brett: And we’re looking for the maximum dimensions you should have for the forum, it’s about 1,000 X 1,000 pixels. So we’ve run the range. There have been some that were like 75 X 100, too small. We’ve had some, they we’re like 4,000 X 4,000, too big.
Gina: Too big.
Brett: So how do you get it to 1,000 X 1,000 before you upload it? So we’ll put that tutorial up in there. I’ll make it in that section — I’ll put it in that section so that you can refer to that and learn it before you upload the photos. So that should help solve most of the issues.
Gina: Hopefully, yeah. It’s challenging you know?
Brett: Yeah. It’s almost a growing pains right?
Gina: It is. It is. But –
Brett: So, that will be neat.
Gina: Yeah.
Brett: And then, as I’ve said, our winner every week will get a little badge –
Gina: A little badge.
Brett: — which will show up in your profile. So that every time that you make a forum post –
Gina: We’ll see your badge.
Brett: Wouldn’t that be cool?
Gina: That will be really cool.
Brett: Like a badge of honor.
Gina: Uh-hmm.
Brett: And you can have multiple — what we’ll do is we’ll establish a system. You could actually win multiple times. So that would be pretty cool to become like a PhD of winning the Jewelry Making Professor contest.
Gina: Wow!
Brett: Wow! You could put that on your resume.
Gina: I know! That would be exciting.
Brett: So that’s pretty neat.
Gina: Yeah.
Brett: So, that’s what going on at the forum. The other exciting thing that we have going on which all of you received e-mails about was we’re trying to kick off the year by having a much stronger social media presence. So Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — really we didn’t do much with that in the last couple of years and now it has become kind of a big thing. So we’re jumping on the bandwagon and rather than just kind of start it and just kind of see how it goes, we said, “Hey, let’s have a contest” and give people a chance to win a lifetime membership to Jewelry Making Professor to watch all of our beading videos.
Gina: Wow!
Brett: Or if you’re not lucky enough to be chosen for that — six consolation prizes. So win your membership to Jewelry Making Professor.
Gina: That’s pretty good.
Brett: So what do you have to do? All the instructions are there, we sent an e-mail. You know, make comments on Facebook, do things on Twitter and YouTube and things like that and you accumulate points.
Gina: Uh-hmm.
Brett: Now, it doesn’t mean that the person with the most points wins, it’s the person with the most points has a better chance of winning because each of those points is like an entry into the drawing if you will.
Gina: Okay.
Brett: So at the end of the contest which will end at the end of this month, the computer actually selects randomly from all of those drawings so the winner is going to be for the grand prize as well as for the consolation prizes. So, the more entries you have the better chance you have of winning. So go out, make Facebook posts and make Twitter posts or whatever they call it — tweets!
Gina: Tweets.
Brett: And YouTube comments and all that, and hey, increase your chances of winning. That’s pretty cool.
Gina: Yeah, that sounds like fun. Exciting!
Brett: Yeah. That’s the way we do things here.
Gina: I know. We are so much fun!
Brett: Why just have a boring — I mean it’s social media right?
Gina: Right. Yeah.
Brett: It’s supposed to be like cool and fun so we’re starting it off right so…
Gina: Okay. Cool stuff.
Brett: Is that it for the week?
Gina: I think that’s it for the week.
Brett: That’s it for the week. So thank you very much and we’ll see you all next week.
Gina: See you later.
Brett: Bye.
Gina: Bye.
I LOVE that you have transcripts for your video updates. I have no patience at all for watching videos. Any chance of transcripts for the video tutorials?