Arctic Spring, by Caprilicious Jewellery

 Hello, good people, it's lovely to talk to you again, and thank you so much for joining me. I've been working hard at the day job and was consequently looking forward to a weekend off, but alas, am having to work again due to sickness in the ranks. However, the weather report is good, so all is not doom and gloom.

I don't generally do sales, but I've found that I have too many earrings in my stash - quite a few were sold at the show at Leamington Spa, but I didn't have the room to display them all, and loads of them came back home with me, and they were most grumpy at being back in the large shoebox they currently live in. So just to give them a chance to be fostered to a good home, I've got them on sale till the 1st of August.

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Arctic Spring

 Idly flicking through channels on the TV, as you do when there's nothing interesting on, I saw a program about the Arctic Tundra. The Arctic is almost entirely covered by water, much of it frozen into glaciers and icebergs, and these are solidified freshwater. In fact, the glaciers and icebergs in the Arctic make up about 20% of Earth’s supply of freshwater. Most of the Arctic, however, is the liquid salt water of the Arctic ocean basin. Some parts of the ocean’s surface remain frozen all or most of the year. This frozen seawater is called sea ice which is often covered with a thick blanket of snow. The Arctic has the largest concentrations of mineral deposits – copper-nickel ore, platinum and rare earth metals, phosphorus, chromium, diamonds, silver, gold among others. In the spring, after the long, dark nights of winter, icicles melt and as the sun gets higher in the sky, the flowers of the Tundra begin to bloom, the majority of them are mosses, grasses, shrubs, and lichen, which grow close to the ground and can withstand the inhospitable climate. While I was researching this theme, I found a painting called Arctic Spring by a Swedish painter, Joacim Broström. His abstract of an Arctic Spring is beautiful, but made all the more interesting because he rarely uses paintbrushes, preferring instead to use household objects - pipette bottles, straws, toothpicks, plastic bags, and cardboard, among others.

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So, this is my interpretation of an Arctic Spring

The pendant is a slice of agate, surrounded by a bezel of silvery seed beads and AB coated crystals, tipped with tiny seed beads in pink and green. The bail is a long strip of woven silver beads, dripping with silvery 'icicles', their tips melting into crystal teardrops. There are a few Czech marguerite flowers in pink and pale green, to signify the pink saxifrage which is the very first flower that comes up in the spring. The necklace is made of quartz shards, delicately colour enhanced in a pale pink and green. It is meant to be worn close to the neck so that the pendant gets maximum visibility. 
I was so pleased that it was picked up a couple of hours after I posted it on instagram by one of my regular customers. The lady in question will wear it beautifully I'm sure, and get a great deal of pleasure from it.

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By the time I'd finished Arctic Spring, my fingertips were sore and I had no mojo left, so that's me for this week. Have a lovely week, and I'll catch you next Friday, same time, same place.
Until then
​xx