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 Put Some Color In Your Life
Try using a color wheel from an art supply store as a tool to help you discover new color schemes for your bead projects. Find a color wheel that has a full range of tints and hues for each color, and spend some time near a window with good natural light, just playing with it and enjoying the magic of color. When you feel saturated with color, sit down at your beading table and see what happens! This is an especially nice treat for yourself in late winter when everything seems like it’s been colorless for a long time. Color Wheel at left was under $5.00 at Aarron Brothers.
Photographing Earrings
 When I photograph earrings, I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to make both earrings appear perfectly vertical and perfectly parallel to each other in the fnished photo - no matter how precisely aligned they seem when I’m shooting or scanning them. But this frustration led me to a neat discovery:
Placing earrings at artsy angles to each other is much more visually intriguing and dynamic, and romanticizes the piece. So don’t kill yourself trying to achieve a boring, perfectly vertical earring shot. Lay the earrings out at interestingly unusual angles to each other and let art happen!
Ask Your Students
 If you teach beading workshops, you can really help your teaching business grow by finding out what classes your students would like to take in the future. At the end of each workshop, give your students feedback slips that include a space for them to request future classes. Often students will give you ideas for popular classes that you wouldn’t have thought of offering on your own. And if you teach the workshops they want to take, there’s an excellent chance they’ll sign up for them, and bring some beading friends with them.
Make Sure You Have The Keys!
  If you display your jewelry in locked cases when you do art shows, be sure to keep the cases’ spare set of keys in a safe place that will be with you when you do shows. This may be your wallet, your money pouch, the box that holds your gift wrap supplies, or whatever. Just be sure the safe place isn’t hundreds of miles away at home when your display is all set up at a show! You don’t want to have to wait for a locksmith or break the glass to get into your jewelry cases.
Replaceable Eyeglass Loops
 The fiber, plastic or rubber loops at the ends of beaded eyeglass/sunglass leashes tend to wear out and split apart after a year or two. But you don’t have to restring the entire leash just to replace the loops. Put a lobster clasp on each end of the leash as you string it, and let the clasps grip the plastic or rubber loops. If you sell eyeglass leashes, include a replacement pair of loops in a little jewelry ziplock bag; the spare loops cost you pennies but add a great deal to the customer’s perception of the leash’s value. Loops pictured are KT-040 and lobster clasps are KT-007 from BeadBabe.com
Gift Tags - A Nice Touch
 My customers appreciate the free gift wrap I provide with every jewelry purchase. But I’ve had a hard time finding gift tags that are small enough to accompany jewelry gift wrap; most tags seem to dwarf the box or pouch by comparison. So I make my own gift tags easily and very cheaply using perforated business cards from office supply stores, in floral patterns or other prints that go well with my jewelry packaging. I punch the cards out and fold them in half (with the floral / printed side on the outside, and the blank white side inside for writing on), to make a small, elegant card that can either fit inside a velvet pouch or satin mini-purse, or be attached to the outside of a jewelry gift box. Now all the customer has to do is sign the gift card and give the gift!them. You can also use this trick for shooting some of those neat photos of a bracelet, ring, or other piece of jewelry standing up dramatically with no visible support.
Photo courtesy of Soleberry Modern Stationers
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