I had such a GOOD time demonstrating encasing to the members of the Southeast Michigan Glass Beadmakers Guild on Sunday!  What a great bunch of people they are. I made this encased "stripy" bead which exploits the characteristic of the encasing glass spreading out the dots to little lines, i.e., glass magic. Teaching is always so rewarding--if you really want to know something, teach it to someone else. Preparing to teach always results in some "aha" moments for me--those moments of awareness of what you do and how you do it. And if you write it down in a handout, the way I did for Sunday's demo, then you have to organize your thoughts and thoroughly describe your process in written form which helps you refine the technique even further. I even challenged myself to get out of my comfort zone and demonstrate some techniques in which I didn't feel as confident. Of course I practiced them before demonstrating them on Sunday. The neat thing is that a couple of those techniques, which I hadn't used much before, will definitely become part of my bead-making repertroire from now on. So probably, in retrospect, I learned as much, or perhaps even more than those who were at the meeting and that's a good thing.