Spice Up Your Jewelry Collection With a Touch of Thai - MysticWynd Monday Mania

It's Monday and that means the beginning of a new giveaway period! This week's giveaway - this amazing Thai WhirlyGig Necklace, featuring a vintage Thai bead - comes to us courtesy of CrystalPearl on Etsy.

With an original retail value of $12, this beautiful unisex handmade silver and vintage Thai bead pendant is being offered with a plaited leather thong in your choice of colors.

Pearl, the owner of CrystalPearl, joined Etsy in June as an international seller based in West Sussex, UK. Offering a wonderful selection of hand-beaded upcycled OOAK fashions as well as lovely vintage jewelry and vintage bead designs like the one being offered in this giveaway, CrystalPearl is a great place to shop for quality goods with a touch of vintage charm translated into contemporary flair.

In addition to lending a lifetime of sewing and designing skills to her business resume, Pearl and her creations can be found on a variety of social networking and business platforms. My personal favorite was her blog - a down-to-earth and humorous view of life that no woman should miss!

Pearl can be found online at:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=100000047172108&v=wall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AICHARTEE
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16535372@N05
Burdastyle: http://www.burdastyle.com/member/CrystalPearl
USTrendy: http://www.ustrendy.com/crystal-pearl
Her Blog: http://menopauseandmayhem.blogspot.com/

I thought it would be great for you to get to know a little bit more about Pearl, her life and her business, so I asked her a few questions. These are her responses!

Your shop bio indicates you're a woman with a significant amount of experience in your craft. When and why did you decide you wanted to take your skills in a new direction and start selling your upcycled creations? I first became interested in selling my upcycled creations earlier this year when a spell of unemployment made me consider other avenues of income. As I have always been interested in needlework as a creative outlet and used to have an Ebay shop, I decided to join Etsy and use my creativity to provide a possible source of income.

About your blog - Menopause and Mayhem - being "that age" myself, I found myself laughing out loud at your refreshing matter-of-fact musings. What piece of advice would you give to younger women everywhere about dealing with the joys of menopause? I started my blog, http://menopauseandmayhem.blogspot.com/ because I felt it would be useful for “women of a certain age” to be able to share their experiences and try to bring some light hearted positivity to the menopause. The advice I would give to younger women is that the menopause doesn’t have to be a negative experience. There are many positive facets to it, such as cessation of the dreaded monthly period, no more worries about birth control, etc., Each woman’s experience will be slightly different and there is plenty of help to be found on the internet for relief of symptoms, whether that be conventional HRT or natural products.

With product titles like Yellow Salamander, Red Fox, and Arctic Hare, I get the sense there's possibly an animal connection somewhere - care to share? You may notice that most of my upcycled items have animal names. This is because animals are a great passion in my life and I have therefore tried to incorporate this into my item descriptions, i.e. I have taken the basic colour of the garment and matched it to an animal or bird of a similar colour.

Do you design your fashions around the embellishments or do you design the cut first and then decide what embellishments you're going to use? When creating a new design, I take a basic article of clothing and then play around with the beads and adornments at my disposal until I find a pattern which I am happy with. I then measure out where each bead will go and start hand stitching. For items like the Juicy Olive T-shirt, I have amalgamated two T-shirts into one to give a unique one-off product.

You use a wide variety of beads and materials in your work, including some vintage components and I'm guessing rare and exotic pieces. Has there ever been something you've made that you wished the buyer really could appreciate what a rare piece they were getting? Many of my items are embellished with 80 year old Chinese glass trade beads from Thailand which I have specially imported from a friend who lives there. These are authentic 80 year old beads which were used for trading purposes, thus have a wonderful history attached to them. I feel these beads add something very special to a garment, which I hope the buyer will appreciate.

Name one thing that not many people know about you. One thing that not many people know about me is that I am an avid mushroom hunter who has studied UK mushrooms for years. I often go foraging for mushrooms in the local woods and bring home my edible finds to fry in butter, with a little bit of garlic, then serve on hot buttered toast.

So there you have it - the lowdown on my new friend Pearl from CrystalPearl! Alrighty - so you're asking... how do you win that beautiful pendant?

To receive your first entry in the drawing for this lovely necklace, you must simply visit CrystalPearl, find your favorite item in the shop, come back to this post and list the item description along with your contact information for an entry in this giveaway.

Additional entries may also be obtained by a separate comment as follows:

Receive one additional entry by becoming a new blog follower at http://menopauseandmayhem.blogspot.com/ and/or http://mysticwynd.blogspot.com/ - post the date you began following in this posts' comments. (If you already follow either blog, that counts as well!)

To receive 2 additional entries, make a purchase at CrystalPearl and post the item description (title) in this posts' comments.

Receive one additional entry for following Pearl at twitter http://twitter.com/AICHARTEE

Receive one additional entry for becoming Pearl's fan on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=100000047172108&v=wall

Receive one additional entry for blogging about this giveaway (Post your blog link in the comments on this giveaway)

Receive one additional entry for tweeting about this giveaway (Post the tweet url in the comments on this giveaway)

In addition to the entries for the giveaway, I'm adding a little extra incentive to anyone who enters one of my weekly giveaways between now and December 20th. See the details here.

The drawing for this giveaway will be made promptly at noon (MDT) on September 21, 2009 - good luck everyone!

(Don't forget that everyone who enters any giveaway on my blog is also automatically entered in a quarterly drawing for a $25 gift certificate to my shop, Mysticwynd on Etsy. The next quarterly drawing will be held on December 1st!)