I went to Los Angeles to teach a Bead Simple demo — my very first book event — at Felt Club XL Holiday last week, which was so much fun! Thanks to Jenny for organizing such a fabulous event. I got to teach alongside my lovely guest designer Laura Stokes as well as Jamie Marie Chan, Meg Mateo Ilasco and KB Van Horn.

I made up little kits for the demo: super simple drop earrings (bottom row), which were free to anyone who signed up, and more involved necklaces (top row) with either brown or blue beads, wire, seed beads, a clasp, and full instructions to create the Vintagesque Necklace on the book cover. The necklace kits were designed on the fly by my amazing illustrator/guest designer Alexis Hartman. Thank you, Alexis!

I’m planning to have the necklace kits for sale soon either here or in my Etsy shop, so more on that later…

My Bead Simple class officially filled up with 20 students well before 1:00, and then an extra 15 or 20 people came on top of that! The response was overwhelming, and I really appreciated how patient everyone was as I taught basic beading techniques to such a big crowd. People shared pliers with each other and helped each other with next steps while I was on the other side of the mega-table, showing students on that side the earrings and necklace how-tos. People who just came to make earrings finished theirs more quickly, and my necklace-makers had a chance to hang out longer to craft. Here’s an in-progress photo of the blue Vintagesque Necklace, after the class had emptied out a bit:

Everyone made a pair of earrings with the little free kit — here is one of my lovely students modeling hers, with me on the right!

A good handful of students also bought a necklace kit and made their own Vintagesque Necklaces. Here are two of my wonderful students (with me on the right again), all of us wearing our necklaces…

Thanks again to everyone who came to my demo, and I hope you enjoyed it amid the amazing crafty chaos of Felt Club! A huge thank-you to all my students for being so patient since the class was so big.

The other exciting thing was that my first box of promo book postcards arrived! A card went into each goodie bag (given to the first 250 shoppers) and then I got to hand them out to my students, friends, and guest designers who were selling. I love how they turned out…