A Little Movement, or It's All In The Arrangement

Nothing wrong with these earrings. 

In fact, Fred said she liked them when she bought them. But they sat in the drawer.

That would be the late Fred Bloebaum, one of my all-time favorite customers. Fred had style for days, and a real sense of life about her. She was open to all kinds of things, and gave me (and probably anyone else who designed for her) enormous freedom when it came to design, probably because she was a designer herself—a fashion designer who created a line of classic patterns called “Designs by La Fred,” wrote for Threads Magazine, led sewing retreats, and taught at workshops around the country and at Stone Mountain and Daughter in Berkeley, where I think of her every time I shop for buttons for the loop-and-button fastenings I create for bracelets and other jewelry. 
(More on button jewelry soon.)

“I don’t know what it is,” she said, showing me the earrings. “They just don’t do anything for me.”

I looked at them. The components were pretty, especially that blonde wood saucer currently hiding under a brass bead. 

The round bead at the top and the pebble underneath it weren’t helping, so out they went. I decided the overall problem was the earring design was too static—especially for Fred. So I tilted the saucer and wire-wrapped it, turning it into a modified donut, added an onyx bead above it to support the amber pebble now visible. Small onyx pebbles served as cradles for the rhyolite (sometimes called “rainforest jasper”) that formed the top of the new earring. The angled wires on the original earrings were fine, but not with this design; ball posts would show the earrings to better effect.

“Great!” said Fred, and we were on to another project. 

RIP, Fred. You had such a spark.

©2019 Laynie Tzena. All Rights Reserved.