Here's One I Made Earlier.

Having suffered from the creative equivalent of Writer's Block, I gave myself a good talking to, had a few cups of tea in preparation, and sat down yesterday and got it together.

Over the past few weeks I've been quietly making various studies of seed pods (have a read of Creative Irony for the full story), I found I liked the fragility and curved movement of the seed pods on a hydrangea seed head I'd been given.

I made a range of different drawings and sketches of the rounded shapes.  And sketched out a ring design.

From these initial seed pod designs, I sat down yesterday and started playing with some copper wire I had shaped into square wire and then annealed (heated, in order to make more malleable).

This seed pod inspired ring appeared.

This is the model for the final ring which I'll make in silver, with freshwater seed pearls.  

I always make a model in copper.  If I make a mistake it's much cheaper to start all over again.  If I make a mistake using silver, I'm likely to have a wee cry. 

Even though this is the model, I've used freshwater seed pearls, because they looked so lovely against the rich colour of the copper wire.

I've been working on a copper model of a seed pod inspired necklace/collar.  I finally soldered all the model pieces together yesterday.  

To be honest, I'm pretty pleased with the collar.  It's the first thing I 've made using solder.  So far it hasn't fallen apart. 

(Soldering isn't easy.  I kept blowing the pieces of copper away from each other with the flame from the torch.  I also inadvertantly set fire to the bench work top.  But managed to blow it out before any real damage was done.  Comments were made about the smell though.  Ahem.  No harm no foul.)