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I love to leaf through magazines, gaze into store windows, browse through the stacks at the library and "channel surf" the offerings that are endlessly arrayed on our cable television. I don't bother the children with my stories of the hardships of the Olden Days---no one under 30 believes there was really a time when there were only three television channels, not counting the public broadcast that required tin foil or metal rabbit ears to view. There was once a time before computers, too.

Even more so than on the television, there are uncountable numbers of different kinds of content available online. You can learn a little bit or a lot about just about anything, and when there's a specialized interest, groups of like-minded people form together. There are news groups and chat groups. There are web pages and web based magazines (or 'zines, as they are sometimes called) like The Bead Bugle!

The reason the Internet system is often called a "web" is that it brings together such a huge collection of individual lines that converge in so many points and then spring out in other directions, as spider webs do. Now that more and more companies and individuals have computers and know how to use them, the number of web pages and web logs (known as "blogs") are growing by huge leaps.

Think of it using a bead analogy; so many of us have wonderful collections of lovingly accumulated beads. Sometimes we bring them together into fabulous wearables or other art--necklaces, bracelets, earrings, even the lamp shade can benefit from some well placed beads. When we start to show them to others, and see what others in the same media are doing, we give and get inspiration and energy for more creativity. Its the same way with blogs! I find blogs that I enjoy, and follow their links to other blogs that will usually have at least ONE that is memorable and worth revisiting. Some of my favorites include Cynthia Tinapple's Polymer Clay Daily and Maggie Maggio's Smashing Color .

In Belle Armoire magazine I have a column that is talking about blogs this time. In the course of writing it, I did a lot of research, not only in looking at blogs that already existed, but also taking a look at the different sites that host blogs. Using the templates there and following the directions, you can build a blog in moments, and then spend many hours tweaking its structure to your own taste, and adding links and posts.

Blogs require less knowledge of html than do web pages, and offer some highly sophisticated "widgets" or chunks of prewritten code that do specialized things on the site. The blog owner has many choices in how things appear. Like starting a necklace, the artist makes choices about colors and spacing, and adds focal images. Although you start with a template, customizing the look is easy.

Sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com have helpful FAQ's that can guide you through most issues.

Recently I've started one for myself, one for my husband and his music, and one for the local bead store in town. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of them have beads here or there. The header art seen on At The Helm includes polymer clay discs and dichroic glass and there's a beaded guitar shown on one page. The cover art on of some of his CD's includes polymer clay, as do his mosaic sculptures.

Around The Lounge starts out with beads and continues with more beads. The necklaces shown here include a piece created with copper wire and many beads by in-store artisan and instructor Laura Humenik. Her sense of color is exquisite and she is able to find JUST the right pieces to go together.

In the necklace shown at right she used beads and a central polymer clay pendant created by Janis Holler, who also offers classes through Bead Lounge. So do Laura and I; and I'm the class coordinator there as well as the web designer--you can see how these things all start to link up!

My own blog is titled Creative Connections, and there you will find me talking about beads, dolls, polymer clay, textiles, publishing and graphics, and the internet. And so, a little of all those things went into my header art. The circles and strips of polymer clay shown at the beginning of this article were scanned and then photoshopped and put with other images into layers. The hand dyed cotton fabric that became the spiritdoll is embellished with LOTS of beads and a polymer clay face. Just as with polymer clay and beads, the computer allows us to manipulate and place things until we like the way it looks.