All the month of June, I will be participating in a special event sponsored by SIJA. Each member of the group has designed exclusive and unique handcrafted jewelry for today’s bride and her entourage.
If you would like to see the three exclusive pieces I created for the expo, please drop by my Bridal Expo page. I also invite you to check out the SIJA website to view the pieces of the rest of the SIJA members.
Have you ever thought of something, made something, said something and then seen or heard the exact same thing only days or hours later. Worse yet (relatively speaking), since what you have seen or heard was public and what you did or said may have been private, it appears as if you are copying. However, you know it isn’t copying, but just a case of GMTA.
Well, I made a necklace a few weeks back from some new beads I bought at a wholesale show I went to at the beginning of May. One strand was Amazonite and the other was coin-shaped white freshwater pearls. I bought the pearls, because I really like using them and had planned on buying them for a long while, but the amazonite beads were a spur of the moment kind of thing. A friend of mine wanted to show me some really unusual Botswana Agate beads, which I ended up buying as well, and I happened to see the Amazonite among the multitude of beads on the seller’s table. Their shape is what got me; they looked like angular islands. I had to have them.
When I got home and cataloged my swag from the show, I had my beads layed out, and I was instantly grabbed on how well the two looked together. I just knew I had to make a necklace. (Heck… I may end up making a matching bracelet and some earrings, too.) I also knew just what to call it, “Nereids playing in Poseidon’s Domain”. To me, it was perfect looking.
Here’s where my point for this post (yes, it has a point.) comes to be apparent. The following week I was at my local mall mega-bookstore, and lo, I see a prominent beaded jewelry magazine with the same exact necklace with a few differences. Just a few that someone would think I copied the magazine and put my own twist on the necklace. To be honest, my first reaction was to laugh. My second was to pick up the magazine and take a really good look at it. It was very similar to my own. In fact, it had some things I had planned on adding to my own necklace since when I first had made it, it just didn’t lay the way I thought it should. I had planned on fixing this by adding some round sterling silver balls in between my coin pearls and the Amazonite pieces.
Now I wonder if I should even show my piece at all. I know I couldn’t have possibley copied the piece since one: I had never seen that particular issue until that day and two: I had bought the Amazonite beads strictly on instinct. Then again, how could I not. I mean the name alone is cool. (I love Greek Myths.) It deserves a showing of some kind.
Just goes to show you… Great Minds Think Awry.