Pro-Soup Propaganda

Tuesday Giveway from Pangea Handmade!

Wooooo hooo! Today's giveaway is from one of my favorite jewelry-making friends! I actually had to check Angie's answer to her "how we met" question to find out how we met because I feel like we have been friends for so long that I just could not remember! She has a fabulous and fun blog here and I love reading her updates on Facebook. She is so fun and full of life, so I hope you love her as much as I do! She is also nice enough to give away a pair of her Joan of Arc earrings. Aren't they gorgeous?! I totally love them and I hope my readers do, too!

P.S. In total awesomeness, Angie is having a solstice sale and everything in her shop is marked at 20% off and you ALWAYS get free shipping with Pangea Handmade!!

Name: Angie Haugland
Age: 25
Location: Madison, WI

Where can we find you online? (links to your online sites): http://pangeahandmade.com, http://pangeahandmade.com/blog, http://facebook.com/pangeahandmade, http://twitter.com/pangeahandmade, http://pinterest.com/pangeahandmade, http://flickr.com/photos/angelacanblog, http://pangeastore.etsy.com (ok, i guess i'm a little bit social-media-addicted...)

 How did we meet? we met on twitter! :o) & then we added each other on facebook, so now we're closer to being "real life" friends. almost! :D

What do you do for a living? right now, I make vintage-inspired jewelry and sell it at http://pangeahandmade.com and a few craft fairs here and there...

How did you take up your artistic medium?  I actually sort of stumbled into it. I started way back in the day (when I was maybe 12?) making embroidery floss friendship bracelets and sending "catalogs" of my work to my relatives and taking phone orders from them. My dad had his own business at the time, so he had invoices lying around and I am a sucker for office supplies/ephemera, so I wanted to make my own invoices. It was actually pretty sophisticated, now that I'm looking back at it....haha! I had some shoddy product photos that I made my dad make multiple prints of, so I could send them with each mailing that went out to my extended family, and I even put examples of all the different styles (braided, knotted, macrame, etc I could do, as well as a list of colors to choose from. I think I sold them for like $0.25 a color or something. I had figured out that I could get a whole skein (?) of embroidery floss, you know those little bunches with the little label around the middle for about $0.25 each, so if I could sell someone a necklace for $0.75, that would buy me three new colors of floss, and I'd only use about a quarter of the skein on each bracelet. I was quite the crafty business-kid. I think my passion has kind of always been split between that realm and the handmade one, so this type of business was a great fit for me. I found Etsy about 4 years ago, and I think I was flabbergasted for a while that something so cool and so perfect for me could exist. I have since branched off of Etsy (now I'm using it for destash, with the hopes of putting jewelry back in it soon) to my own cart website, but the initial love still exists. :)

Three reasons you’re awesome: Ok, so there was this game we used to play in middle school called "2 Truths & a Lie". We are going to do that with these. Two of these things are true, and one is COMPLETELY false. I'll let you decide which is which: 1- I have a cat named after the Little Mermaid. 2 - I can say the alphabet backwards just as fast as I can forwards. 3 - I speak German.

What’s your favorite quote? Oooh, that's really, really tough. Unfortunately, I don't know the author of either one, but I'd say it's a tie between these two (because they kind of go hand-in-hand): "If you have enemies, good. It means that you stood up for something you believed in." & "Focus on being a good person, not on pleasing others."

What do you do when you’re having a bad day to remedy it? Honestly, I am not quite sure. It's not that I have bad days, but I tend not to recognize that it's bad or categorize it that way until the day is almost over, because it usually means that so many things have gone wrong that day that I can even begin to comprehend where it all started. At that point, the most I can do is stop everything I'm doing and call it a day. Some days are just better spent in bed with a bowl of popcorn and a TV series on DVD anyway...

What’s a piece of good advice you’d like to pass onto the readers? I think it goes a long with my two favorite quotes, in a way. If you don't like what you're doing, change it. If you don't like where you live, relocate. If you don't like what's in your way, move it. It's easy to get caught up on why things not working out as they should, but you can't dismiss your ability to change them. It certainly won't be easy, but you'll wonder "what if" for the rest of your life if you don't. Do I sound like Nike yet? JUST DO IT. This advice has served me well more than twice, and I'm sure there is something out there you've been meaning to accomplish/try/be awesome at....

Anything more you’d like to tell us? #2 is the one that's false. ;o)