Picking Chokecherries
The truth is, I've just been playing. Digging into my materials, sawing here and soldering there. I spend so much time doing fiddly, concentrated work that sometimes I forget how to just make with wild abandon.
Yesterday, I sat down without a plan and started stringing beads and unrolling chain. I didn't measure twice before cutting (I didn't measure once for that matter!), instead allowing the bits and pieces to come together on their own. I feel like sometimes the process has wisdom to share if I slow down and just let it come to me, so I opened myself up to whatever thoughts and ideas might come my way.
Before long, I found myself thinking back to a chokecherry tree that grew in the yard of my childhood home. The fruit was wildly bitter, but somehow my mom was able to transform that pucker inducing fruit into the most delicious jelly. So every summer, we would climb up into the tree and stretch our arms sykward to pick the chokecherries.
Apart from one disastrous experience (where I reached just a little too far behind me and fell off of my ladder) I always think back on that particular summer activity with a lot of joy. I liked being up among the leaves, talking with my family and thinking, always thinking, about spreading chokecherry jelly on toast in the distant future...
The result of all this reminiscing are these fringy, glittering earrings inspired by my chokecherry picking adventures! The little sapphire beads are the fruit, in varying degrees of ripeness, and forged dangles call to mind insect wings, just grazing my cheek as I reached up into the overhead branches.
