How having a plan doesn't always work (quite the way you intended)

Looking back at January from the safety of February I think I can say for certain I went a bit mad.

It started off innocently enough as my New Year's Bead Resolutions were my attempt to focus my bead collecting, and equally importantly my spending, into a streamlined method of acquiring and buying that would be more cost effective and would let me achieve certain goals, such as having an amber bracelet, without getting too sidetracked or having multiple bracelet ideas on the go and having to buy even more beads just to get one finished.

I should have known that as logical as I can be in my working life, that the bead collecting part of my brain wouldn't respond in such a sensible manner.  What actually happened was I bought more beads than I've ever bought in 1 month before, and I went so over budget that the budget line couldn't even be seen with The Hubble Telescope.

To be fair to myself, I did stick within my New Year's Bead Resolutions, I, er, just hadn't thought it through enough to put a definite limit on quantity - the quality I think I have down to a tee.  From this point of view I think you'll enjoy the beads to come.

One of my resolutions was to focus on the buying of bargain beads off my wish list.  The first sale opportunity was offered by SWAG with a whacking great big discount on beads; this saw me secure Silver Jugend (a bead I have been after for a long time), Lavender Prism, Light Turquoise Prism and Labradorite.

My original list was a lot longer and indeed for several days it looked like I was going to secure my first ever gold and silver bead, Daisy, along with the silver snow bead (which I am still looking for) and a multiple of turquoise prism.  Unfortunately the Sale was plagued with a lot of problems and was very oversubscribed so that left quite a few orders that couldn't be completed, and even with the best efforts by staff to locate beads and deal with the orders there were still some disappointments.  A month further along and those have passed and we are all left with some great beads at what were some of the lowest prices I've ever seen for new trollbeads!

Buying Labradorite online sight unseen was a huge risk, the photos of the bead look as if it has some "flash" in the bead but these are only ever picked up by the camera, in reality this is a lovely green faceted bead which will work well with natural colours on a bracelet, it goes very nicely with my Limited Edition green jasper bead and I imagine it would work well with a lot of my brown beads, but no flash.

Silver Jugend on the other hand is every bit as lovely as it looks, it really is a beautiful silver bead and if you were going to get just one of the chunkier silvers this would be my No.1 recommendation.  It works well with Transformation and I currently have these sat on a... oh sorry I'm getting ahead of myself there.  That will all come later as I have a few more, a'hem, a lot more beads to blog about before I can tell that particular story!

Finally I was able to add to my prism collection with light turquoise prism and lavender prism.  Some of you may remember I came close to having light turquoise prism earlier but was foiled by some flimsy packaging!

I had started (in earnest) following my resolutions and was very pleased with the progress I'd made by early January.  At the time I naively thought this was a head start, not the continued pace of what was to come!