a little cloudy treat

I’m such a lucky girl. On a recent trip to Wellington I spied a brooch at Quoil and thought, “Gosh, if I owned that little cloud I would wear it every day and it would make me oh-so-happy.” As it turns out, my jewellery tutor Jane Dodd is the hand behind the design, and I twisted her arm into making one of my very own. Ok, there wasn’t much actual twisting involved.

In case you can’t tell, that’s an infinitesimally small flock of birds flying across the cloud. There’s something about the juxtaposition of animated cloud shape and realistic birds that seems to speak to me at this point in my life. The back is darkened which also makes me unexplainably happy. Oh, and the front is Scotchbrite’d to a scratchy perfectness.

I’m almost finished with the necklace I’ve been making from the Afghani glass beads I posted about a while back. Hopefully I finish it up by next Monday’s class and I can fiiiinally show you some images.

the place where we live

First go check out this recent post by Remodelista. The loft shown is my perfect abode.

Now for some pictures of the space I do inhabit…

There’s a high probability that we’ll be putting our house up for sale very soon. If you know someone who wants to live on the tip of a peninsula in New Zealand, send them our way .

lisa west

Most of the jewellery out there in the world leaves me cold, or as Orangette would say, makes me utter a mild *meh*. Not so with the simple, elegant pieces of Lisa West. The things she does with silver and mother of pearl make me want to run headlong into the nearest studio and not come out until I’ve created something, anything with a flower motif.

I’ve seen her pieces in person at Royal Jewellery in Auckland, one of my favorite jewellery stores. The moth brooches are particularly compelling in person, the softly brushed metals melting together to form a perfect moth-like texture. You’ll have to go there for yourself, as I can’t get the image to load…

the beauty of becoming

I took a walk after work down through the small town I work in. I got a kiddie-sized ice cream and passed the galleries and shops that lead down to the river.

I didn’t notice at first that these asclepias bushes were teaming with life.

Ice cream dripped down my hand as I watched the catepillars munching away, and the Monarchs slowly flapping, drying out, in the breeze, gently dangling from pale white bell-shaped flowers.

It struck me that they have gone through quite a trial just to get to this quiet flapping. Where do they go from here? Do they find others of their kind, half a world away, and spend a few hours or days drifting along in butterfly bliss? Do they know how few of their kind are left? Can they sense the beauty around them, and the beauty that they themselves possess?