I recently made wedding rings for a lovely couple, Gay and
Ann. They had been together for many years and were now able to be legally
“married”. As part of the process of deciding what the rings would look like I
showed them all of the possibilities I have to offer. They chose their ring
designs which were a pair of magical double Mobius strip bands (subject of
another blog sometime!). One day Ann called me to ask if I could make a pendant
for Gay as a wedding gift from her. She remembered a line of jewelry that I
make from tiny pieces of driftwood from the north shore and asked if I could
make a pendant from a piece of birch bark. We managed to find a piece from a
small branch that had all the distinctive markings associated with that look
and I made the pendant.
Some time passed and I get another call from Ann asking
about a pendant for herself. She was raised on a farm and has always thought of
herself as a “farm girl”. Her parents no longer ran the farm but knew the people
who did. She said there used to be a hundred year old hay barn on the farm that
had fallen down. Some of the pieces had been saved. Ann asked if I could
possibly use a piece of the old weathered barn wood as a background for the
pendant. “Sure!”
Ann went to visit her parents. Her father is living with
Alzheimer’s disease. As they were talking she asked her father if he could draw
a picture of the old barn. He used to entertain her as a bored child in church
with simple sketches. He proceeded to draw a very nice likeness of the old Illinois
barn from memory. They then got a small board from the barn and brought it to
me.
I was able to make a reverse impression of the wood texture and from that make a positive in wax. I carved “farm girl” in one piece of the wax and carved a copy of the sketch of the barn in another piece as a pendant for Ann’s mother. We are all pretty happy with the result.
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| Cabin Sketch |
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| Wood piece from the Barn |
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| reverse image of barn wood piece in silver |
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| Wax casting |
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| Finished pendant |
