{Feature + Giveaway} RedBracelet's LuckXury Collection

Tali is the founder of RedBracelet on Etsy, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is currently 38 years old and a mother of two children, Shelly (11 years old) and Alon (6 years old). She has an MA in political science and communication. Her Luckuxy collection combines 'Luck' and 'Luxury', as you can see below:

LuckXury fashion welcomes good energies ♥ ♥

LuckXury jewellery collection is an original combination of good luck & wishes, fashionable, trendy design & a comfortable feeling. Luckxury can be part of your daily life - there's no need to take it off thanks to the durable & water proof materials used in creating it. Well... let's face it, who wants to take off a vital jewelry that has the power to give you luck, joy, success and protection against the evil eye?

LuckXury is handmade and designed by Israeli designer, Tali. Each piece of jewelry combines hand knitting and sculpturing. The turquoise amulets are being sculptured from a special blend that is developed exclusively for this collection in order to have a durable and washable product.

All LuckXury collection is shipped with a gift from Tali (RedBracelet.etsy.com) in a festive wrap with a gift from her: A designed blessing card – empty, for buyers personal use, in a great smelling envelope.

The "LuckXurys cameos" are unique and specially designed with Kabbalah motives and spiritual folklore amulets that protect and use against Evil Eye. The "LuckXury" collection and cameos is certainly the Best Gift for yourself or your beloved, whom you wish to be safe, healthy and happy!!!

* INTERVIEW *

How did you start your art/craft?

As all good things in life are accidental, I designed and created a unique turquoise hamsa-hand necklaces. One pair. For myself. For years I thought that turquoise is a vital color, so I designed lots of jewellery from metal and sometimes combined with turquoise components. My love for this color is mostly in the jewellery field, not connected to folklore believes, but to fashion taste. I think this powerful color is well-suited with almost every color.

I have all materials because I need to add some products in a shop to get to a certain sum for credit card transaction. I use calcium, polymer clay etc.

I also have some stones I bought 3 years ago during a vacation abroad and used only few of them since. And of course, I already had crafting tools. It all combines together to produce a wonderful, strong and unique look. Many people were asking me to make a few for them. I was used to such requests since I had crafted jewellery as a hobby for more than 10 years. But this was different. It looked like no other... So I decided to respond and accept the orders. After a few months of marketing to shops, online marketing piqued my interest. This was really cool because it suited my lifestyle as a career pr woman.

Who / What is your biggest inspiration?

When I got married, my grandmother, which came from Bulgria to Israel a long-long time ago, put [A GARLIC!] inside my bra, on the morning of the wedding day. She said that it will protect me from the evil-eye and will assure that only good energies are around me. That strong memory was in my mind when I first created this turquoise-turquoise… which is another belief of my grandmother. This family tradition gives the concept a real meaning.

I've just started the LuckXury collection for more than a year. It is a unique advancement of the usual jewellery I used to make. It has a fashionable look and a marketing concept, which is an interesting combination of something the eye can’t see - believe, spirituality and fashion - material and design innovation and true wishes.

According to Tali, people who can enjoy her work are ones who are...

optimistic, believing in the good, hoping for the best, feeling the joy of color and remembering good energies each time he/she looks at the LuckXury jewellery collection.

Do you have any advice for amateur crafters out there?

Yes, my advice for them is to...
* find a suitable field / category and have friends connected to it

* be friendly to others

* be a giving person – customers will come back!

Tali will include a small gift with every purchase, which is a pretty greeting/blessing card (blank for the customer's personal use.)

Oh, and try to snap good pictures for your items / products.

TRY TO CREAT A SOLID CONCEPT AND FROM THERE TO PATH THE VARIETY.

Besides handcrafting beautiful accessories, is there anything else you are passionate about?

Beauty , fashion and aesthetics… and vegtables

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Madonna Kabbala Red String Hamsa Good Luck Evil eye protection Double turquoise eyes ($2.50)

"Hamsa" is believed to be a power of protection from Evil Eye and for good energy, prosperity, health and happiness. All these good things will happen to the one who hangs Hamsa in his house, car, on his body etc. This is the reason for hanging small Hamsa ('Hamsika') on baby's strollers. Hamsa is the most popular and ancient protective symbols of many religions all over the world but it came first from Arab traditions. "Hamsa" means "five" in Arabic, a number who reminds the five fingers of the human hand and its physical abilities to fight, change situations and to protect. The number Five has, according to the common believes, magical power to gain fulfillment and it symbolizes the creators protective due to the analogous to god's name in Hebrew and Jewish mysticism.

LuckXury Brown bracelet - multi Kabbalah for fashion and good energies
($50.00)

Turquoise is the traditional color of the Hamsa that suits her thanks to its strong energy against Evil Eyes. It is a strong color that leaves no one indifferent, and it is always fashionable too!

luck charms ivory-gold mustard wild bracelet turquoise cameo bohemian fashion hippy so long with an indian button ($100.00)

Garlic is a symbol for mystical powers that can protect the wearer from negative vibrations of the evil eye, jealousy and law energies. These believes were created mostly at the Balkans countries due to its strong smell that can keep the demons of the evil eye away.

Sweety girly bracelet blue and golden pair turquoise red and pink hearts decor ($25.00)

Eye symbolize the fight in the evil eye. The ancient Greek seafarers painted eyes on the prows of their ships as protection against the evil eye power. According to the traditional story, the evil eye runs away as soon as it meets the Jewelery eye. Evil eye tend to think it is a real eye that catches her worst behavior.

Red bracelet eye cameo luck evil eye keeping away Kabbalah faith ($35.00)

Red string According to the Kabbalah wisdom colors have specific frequencies and energies. Red is the color of danger associated with blood but also the color of love and passion. Thank to those associations it is the most powerful symbol and color for evil eye protection, as the Kabbalah wisdom recommended

Tali has offered a lucky reader $20 to spend at her shop. The winner can use the gift certificate to redeem product(s) which sums up to $20 or use it when purchasing from Tali's shop to get a rebate. All readers can get a 20% discount when they mention "Aik" in the "Note from buyer" when making a purchase from redbracelet.etsy.com.

You have to do ONE of all the ways stated below to enter. It is not mandatory to complete all of them. Each one that you completed apart from your first entry will be counted as an extra entry. Please leave separate comments for every (extra) entry and leave all the usernames / links so that I can verify your entries. Most importantly, don't forget to leave your e-mail address!

1. "Like" Tali's Facebook Fan Page

2. Send Tali a Friend Request on Facebook

3. Follow Tali on Twitter

4. Visit Tali's shop, find your favourite piece and "write" on Tali's Facebook wall what you love the best from redbracelet.etsy.com + a link to the piece
5. Post it on www.facebook.com/luckxurys too (Refer to 4)

6. Heart your favourite piece from Tali's shop on Etsy
7. Heart Tali's shop on Etsy

Giveaway is open worldwide and will end on 15th November, 2010 @ 6 p.m. Malaysian time.

Yeah! I'm Back!

Do you miss me? Do you think of me all the time? Do you miss my words? Don't worry, coz...

I'm going to start blogging again from today onwards. Thank you for being so patient!
By the way, I've posted a new review on The Bookaholics {Sacrifice by Dakota Banks} , please head over to read it if you have time!

Blogging Break

I will be taking a break from blogging because my final exam is just around the corner, but my condition is like the above picture. I just figured out that I have forgotten almost everything my Additional Maths teacher, Mr. Cheong taught me this year. It's time to work harder!

__________________________

By the way, check this out....

An Interesting Question…

A student recently sent me an interesting question. It’s a topic I’ve thought a lot about, so I thought I would share my answer with you.

Here’s the original question:

To what extent does intelligence matter in college success? I have a group of friends that try very hard at school, yet fail to score the grades a select group of people I know are able to do. This question captures my concern about grad school admissions: no matter how hard I try, there will always be hundreds of other “geniuses” out there.

I responded: I don’t believe that intrinsic intelligence plays any significant role at the college level.

Let me explain why…

Doogie Howser Nation

Americans are obsessed with genius. We love the idea of Doogie Howser. We think there are math people and arts people, naturally gifted writers and those who were born to play golf.

In the classroom, however, this causes problems. When we see a student breeze through a class while we struggle, we label him “naturally good” at the subject and then write it off as something that we’re not meant to master. This holds back a lot of students from reaching their potential. It also causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

Here’s the thing: I don’t buy it. And neither do scientists. No matter how hard researcher look, they can’t find any trace that significant natural abilities actually exist.

How Does a Piano Virtuoso Become Good?

In the early 1980s, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist from the University of Chicago, launched a massive research effort to answer a simple question: how do extremely talented people become good?

His team identified 120 individuals who achieved international recognition. They were split evenly between the following fields: concert pianists, tennis players, swimmers, mathematicians, sculptors and research neurologists.

Over a period of five years, his team conducted extensive interviews with the individuals (and their families) to reconstruct their path to superstardom. The important result from this study was not what Bloom found, but what he failed to find: There was no trace of prodigies.

These stars got good only after many years of deliberate practice. Not only did it take a long time, but for many of these years there was no evidence that they would one day be great. After 6 years of serious training, the future concert pianists, for example, were still competing only at the local level. And they lost as much as they won The swimmers, on average, competed for 8 years at the national level before they started placing first, second, or third. Among the mathematicians and the neurologists, no one become renowned until their late 20s or early 30s.

This begs a natural follow-up question: if practice is key, why did these 120 individuals practice so hard while so many others give up? Fortunately, one of the researchers from Bloom’s team thought this question was worth exploring.

The Source of Persistence

In a 1997 study, Lauren Sosniak, a member of Bloom’s original research team, dived back into the interview archives to figure out why the superstars persisted. She soon discovered that almost without exception they had all been exposed to their field, in a playful, unstructured, exploratory manner very early in life.

This random exposure built an interest which gave them just enough confidence to persist through the first stage of formal training. This extra persistence distinguished them enough to get re-discovered and advanced to more rigorous formal training. Their confidence grew. They were rediscovered and placed into ever more elite groups. Their confidence grew some more. And so on…

How a Math Person Becomes a Math Person

Sosniak gives the example of a future math star who recalled that when he was a kid, his dad would play a game where he would ask him what fraction of his omelet was left on the plate. He thought it was fun and soon learned his fractions.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, how this early exposure might have played out throughout the future mathematician’s education.

The omelet game might have generated slightly more confidence when the student was in his early elementary school math classes. His teachers, impressed that he seemed to know the fractions so well, probably would have then tracked him into the gifted and talented programs for math. At that young age, there isn’t much criteria to judge by, so seeming to be engaged in the math classroom is as good as any.

Once there, the student would get advanced training. More importantly, his confidence that he was good in math would increase. This would lead him to spend more time grappling with problems, which provides perfect deliberate practice (he’s stretching just beyond his ability) which in turn would make him even better. This gives him more confidence which leads to more deliberate practice and more ability, and the cycle continues.

By the time he arrives at college he’ll be considered a math whiz. By the time he’s 30, he’s a star in his field.

Why?

Because his dad liked to play with his food…

What You Can Do

You will encounter people at college who are much better than you at certain subjects. As we learned, this has nothing to do with a natural ability that you lack. They have simply done more deliberate practice of the relevant skills than you.

Here’s the good news: you can reduce this gap. Instead of despairing about your lack of ability to solve math problems or ace the LSAT, figure out your own plan of deliberate practice.

For example, you can experience huge jumps in math ability by tackling problem sets in a way that stretches your ability and adopting insight-driven review. Remember, this is how I went from a non-math person to a math whiz in one semester.

The same idea holds for other subjects. Early in my college career my papers were lacking. I came from a public high school. Many of my peers were from top private schools that had more demanding classes. These students simply wrote much better than me.

I didn’t, however, despair: “I just don’t have a gift for writing!” Instead, I practiced. I wrote for the newspaper. I wrote for magazines on campus. I obsessed over my papers, pushing myself to be better with each draft. By the time I reached my junior year I would regularly get notes that my papers were some of the best in the class.

I made myself into a “writing person.” Natural ability had nothing to do with it.

To answer the question that motivated this post: stop obsessing over intelligence. People are good at what they’ve practiced. Figure out what you want to be good at, then start making yourself better. You might not catch up to the rare student who has been building his ability over the past decade, but you can get good enough to score well.

Unless of course you’re Doogie. For him, everything just comes easy…

Source: http://calnewport.com/blog

The Limits of Weight Loss

I really don't understand why some people want to look like this. Do you seriously think this is attractive?


It's better to eat a variety of food in the right proportions to be slim and not eating a lot and then purging your food with self-induced vomiting. It's better to be curvaceous like Kate Winslet than to be a bag of bones. At least you can flatter your assets.


And starving yourself is so NOT cool. Why throw away the food when you have it? Have you ever thought of the kids in Africa who want to eat but can't?


I bet you've never seen anything like this before. If you're the kid, I'm sure you'll never want to starve yourself to be thin.

But of course, I'm not asking you to eat until you're like this kid here, although he's kinda cute.


If you want to be slim, then this is the most you should try to achieve. Don't ever try to exceed the limits!