Discover your talents in a Bead Fest Wire Workshop!

I love learning things on my own, inventing and playing. Most of us are self-taught in one or another craft forms. But there are times when being a hermit has its drawbacks, or when homeschooling just isn’t economical, let alone safe. I can cut apart and re-stitch a botched piece of beadwork, but broken beads aren’t toxic. I don’t lose much money tossing a few mutant copper wire coils, but wasting small snips of silver wire adds up. To avoid calamity to purse or person, I look to the experts and take a workshop at Bead Fest. Why? Here are my top 11 reasons to take a class.

2: Learn safely about safety
If you’re a beginner, absolutely take classes in anything with flame, heat, toxic fumes or corrosive substances. Lampworking is an obvious example, with open flame and potentially explosive consequences. But using a hammer, drill, or dremel poses hazards, too—especially if you’re sitting there thinking, what’s a dremel?

A Bead Fest student has fun in a safely supervised lampworked-glass class.

3: Know the must-have tools
I am oddly attracted to specialty pliers with alien noses and funky-colored handles. And while a tool for bending a “V” in metal is something useful for people who do that a lot, I was taught to achieve this effect with tools I already owned, for the few times I want to do that.

Step by Step Wire Jewelry Editor-in-Chief and Bead Fest teacher Denise Peck brings shopping karma to our Bead Fest director, Karen Keegan.

4: Discover which tools do what
In the same light, if I was making a lot of V shapes, that tool would make sense. And, without the insight of a teacher, I wouldn’t have even known that tool existed.

I’m sure a teacher could tell me what the heck these pliers are!

5: Observe efficiency
Watch a teacher at work. Pay attention to their economy of movement, how they place things at hand in their work space and their sequence of production. Good teachers are usually as productive as they are creative. They can show you ways to be faster as well as better at the technique.

Bead Fest teacher Janice Berkebile shows how to keep your work space organized.

6: Add tricks and tips to your repertoire
How often have you seen something demonstrated and said, “Gee, I never thought to do it like that.”  Exactly.

Bead Fest teacher and vendor Lisa Niven Kelly shows a student her technique for stamping.

7: Learn about your medium
For instance, I didn’t know until I took a class that I could melt away an entire piece of silver wire trying to fuse it into a ring. The teacher showed me exactly how to position the torch.

Take a class for any kind of work with a torch so you don’t burn up your art. Believe me, I'm talking from experience.

8: Watch a technique in action
Some techniques are just plain difficult to explain in words or illustrations. I only learned Viking knit by watching it demonstrated by a skilled teacher.

Viking knit is easier to learn when you see it done in person. I didn't know which end was up, down, around, or through until I watched Denise Peck actually doing it.