Birthday Week Giveaway: Day One...

I thought of the different ways I wanted to celebrate my birthday and felt that I'd like to give back to the readers who make it a pleasure to blog. I feel particularly lucky to be apart of a creative community that is so supportive and encouraging.

So, today begins the week of daily giveaways! Each day I'll post another giveaway of some truly wonderful things. All you have to do to win, is to leave a comment on the giveaway of your choosing. Feel free to enter as few or as many of the giveaways as you like. The winners of all of the giveaways will be drawn on Monday (September 27th) at midnight EST. Please remember to leave your name and email address if it doesn't already appear next to your comment. The giveaways are open to everyone, including international readers.

Without further ado... here is the first giveaway:

One lucky winner will claim the prize of this beautiful polymer clay pendant. Robin's egg blue with a Havana brown patina, this pendant hand-stamped with, "If my words had wings" comes courtesy of Heather Wynn-Milican of Swoondimples. It has three bail-loops on the bottom for multiple dangles or unique stringing options. Heather, who recently gave birth to a little boy named Graham, is one of my favorite people in the beading world. She is genuinely one of the nicest people I know and makes really stunning jewelry. Her work is poetry... sometimes literally!

Years before I knew Heather, I was in a summer residency program with a supremely talented artist named Monica Cook. Monica, another one of the sweetest people on the planet, hailed from Savannah, Georgia and had aims of moving to the City. Eventually she decided to make the leap and migrate to the North. I helped her look at apartments and artist studios. After much searching, we found a place on Hope Street off of the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Monica was smitten with the place and revealed to me later that part of the reason she decided on the place was that her bracelet, a stamped copper cuff, had the word "hope" on it and it was like a sign that this was the place.

Fast forward to a car ride with Heather at a bead show in Charleston a few years later. After talking for hours, all the dots aligned and I realized that Heather knew Monica and was the one who had made the bracelet Monica was wearing that day. Such a small world.

Heather really is a talented jewelry maker. To check out her designs, visit her website or swing by her blog. You can see more examples of the fantastic work she does with polymer clay in her Etsy shop.