One of our goody bag winners was so excited about her swag, that she made some nifty felt rings for Jen, Kat & Rebeca. So fun! Thanks, Aniela, we love ’em, and we’re touched that you spent the time to make them for us. Definitely the coolest thing we got in the mail last week!
It’s possible that I’m a little obsessive in checking Amazon rankings for my book, especially considering it hasn’t even been released yet. *cough, cough* Today when I popped over there, I noticed that the cover image is now visible. Woo!
We will begin accepting pre-orders for Chained on our website sometime in September or October. (The book is due out in December.) If you want to be notified as soon as we begin taking pre-orders, please sign up for our special book mailing list.
In the meantime, yes, you can pre-order from Amazon, but I have a favor to ask. If you pre-order, could you do so on the 4th, 14th, or 24th of the month? The reason is that it will help the book’s ranking if there is a spike in orders on one day, and if the book gets pushed to the top of the jewelry category, even for a day, perhaps people will realize that chainmaille is indeed here to stay. 
Thank you for your help in book bombing Chained! (Yes, book bomb is an actual phrase.) We’ll have a massive Book Bomb day much closer to the release date, for all you folks who have wishlisted the book.
The final installment of our Bead&Button photos features the really fun stuff: the jewelry! Most of these are my favorite entries from the Bead Dreams competition. The final three images are other lovely jewelry I saw during the show. Enjoy, and be prepared to drool a little.
Variations of a Peacock by Stephanie Czaja
We are proud to say that Stephanie was a Blue Buddha intern for a short time (before an actual job changed her schedule and meant she could no longer come in). Congrats Stephanie!
And because you can’t really appreciate Rachel’s piece unless you see it close up, here is a detail shot:
Flower of Life Bracelet made by a customer of A Beadtiful Thing, by joining several Flower of Life segments together.
Here’s your chance to meet some of the friendly folk in the B3 booth this year:
Gail, wearing an awesome Jacob’s DNA ladder necklace. We sold out of those kits in sterling in 1 day, and in base metal in 3 days. Whew! (And yes, we’ll post more sterling kits online soon!)
Lori, our cash-register goddess, decked out in Rebeca’s chainmaille scarf & lots of chainmaille with beads that she made. She’s grabbing a swig of water, which is typical booth behavior. It’s amazing how parched one gets workin’ the booth!
Omni. You can’t see the chain- and scale-maille neck chain he made for his badge, but it is awesome. (There’s a pic of it in the Part IV of the Bead&Button blog updates.)
Rebeca & Spider, the fabulously talented chainmaille queen of Spiderchain.com.
Per our usual tradition, we went for a group dinner to The Safehouse. Kat forgot the password to get in, and Lori, Omni & Omni’s girlfriend never knew it in the first place, so they had to waddle like penguins in order to prove their worthiness as undercover agents and gain access to the restaurant. (Jen & Rebeca knew the password, but decided to be mean and not share. And be even meaner and take a photo! On the way home to Chicago, Rebeca reminded Kat what the password was, which caused Kat to give Rebeca a little punch. But we bet Kat will remember the password next year!)
By the end of the show, we were a little loopy. Fire Mountain Gems had passed out hats to vendors and students, but no one was wearing them. So Rebeca decided to show FMG a little love by wearing the hat, but of course, what fun is a baseball cap if you can’t wear it sideways? Here are Kat and Rebeca, with the hats on, and flashing the “pliers” signal. (Yes, the pliers signal in motion is indistinguishable from the “scissors” signal. Details, details…)
But Kat & Rebeca are no where near as cute as Jen in her hat…
Finally, here is Rebeca with the pile of empty boxes of stuff we did NOT bring back to Chicago, because we sold out. Cool!
Those who remembered our claustrophobic booths from years past (10 x 10 last year and *gasp!* 10 x 5 the year prior) were pleasantly surprized with our 20 x 10 booth this year. It seemed almost luxurious with space
Look how many people could fit inside at once, without being elbow-to-elbow!
Here’s another shot of the booth:
And a view of all our base metal kits & instructions along with Spider’s DVD:
You may remember that we were doing a special goody bag giveaway each day of the show. On the first day, there was literally a crowd of people running toward our booth, eager to show us that they’d found Zed’s head:
Unfortunately, most people got it wrong. (We didn’t make it easy, we admit!) But enough folks got it right, that the goody bags were gone within about two minutes. We really admire the people who got it wrong on Thursday, but came back again on Friday to give it a try. Here are Friday’s three lucky winners:
Here is Kat with one of Saturday’s winners. We love that she’s sporting a Celtic Visions Star pendant, one of our best-sellers at the show!
