Today we had our issue-planning meeting for the July issue. For those of you who enjoy thinking about a design for a piece of jewelry, making various sketches, playing with shape and color until you get an idea just right, you'll understand how exciting these meetings are, because we're essentially doing the same thing — playing around with the contents until we get the balance just right.

First of all, we unwrap everything — it's like Christmas. We open the boxes containing the jewelry that's been submitted for projects, and we put all the pieces on makeshift display. When we've finished ooh-ing and aah-ing, we start by considering what will be going on in the jewelry-making world when the issue hits the newsstands. Since the Fourth International PMC conference will be going on in July, we wanted to make sure we had a good selection of metal clay projects for our July issue.

In general, we go on to talk about cover pieces. Of course, we think that all the jewelry we accept is beautiful, but we need to make sure that the cover piece is especially striking, not only because we want to get your attention, but also because it has to hold its own amid a bunch of words on the page and a bunch of other magazines next to it on the newsstand. Sometimes, we save certain pieces for cover pieces, so a piece that's especially stunning might have to wait a few issues to get into the magazine.

After we pick our must-haves, we start filling in the rest of the issue with all the other media we want to cover: metals, polymer clay, mixed media, wire, chain mail, enameling, etc. and technique articles. We want a balanced variety of media and skill levels so that all of our readers, from beginner to advanced, are able to learn something exciting in each issue. We also consider visual style: If we choose a project that's very precise, we may try to choose another that's more organic or rugged.

At the end of the meeting, we do one last check: good mix of media, good mix of skill levels, good mix of styles. And we ask ourselves: will it be beautiful? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then the real work starts.