Beading with Huib Petersen

I spend a lovely day today at a beading class at the Bead Shop in Haddington. Huib Petersen was our tutor. He now lives in the US but was born and raised in The Netherlands so we exchanged some Dutch and discovered that we went to school not far from each other and had much the same experiences in our native country that probably led to both us leaving it eventually! He was a great tutor and we had a wonderful time working on our fish bracelets. Below a detail of Huib's bracelet in which you can see one of the fish in detail. Five of them make up the bracelet together with 2 starfish charms. I finished one fish and one starfish but know that I love the finished product so much that there is no doubt I'll finish it before too much longer. At that time I'll show you the pics of mine!

Huib brought a marvelous selection of his own work with him for us to see, oh and ah over and of course (those of you who know me well can already guess!) buy the kits for. I simply had to have 2 more kits for future beading enjoyment. They are stunning and Huib was kind enough to walk me through the trickier bits during class so fingers crossed, I should be able to make them under my own steam! If you fancy trying out these kits for yourself, all you have to do is go to Huib's website where they are for sale!

Finally Huib mentioned a very unfortunate experience he had with copyright issues (I recognized it only too well!) and when I got back and checked out the blogs I try and read regularly (even with my despicable dial-up) I came across this post by Leah Day. I was already aware of the issues mentioned in the post and share her opinion about the whole issue. I just hope that one day some sort of settlement will be reached as I love using commercial fabric in my quilts but am becoming increasingly wary of doing so! And even if this get settled in the US, this won't necessarily apply in the U.K. As Leah said: WTF (and no, I won't enlighten you about what this means if you don't know so already!!). There must be some kind of middle way somewhere but so far it seems to remain untrodden.

And to conclude I asked Huib for permission to photograph his fabulous work and was given it, hence you're enjoying these pictures.