The Birth Of The Brooch.

  I've been playing with lutradur and evolon, particularly with Lutradur XL, mainly to make journal covers. and found myself making this with some of the scraps I had left over.  Predominately I was thinking about Ben Nicholson, and his painted reliefs, like this one.  The XL is chunky enough to give the same sort of look as board does; it is, of course, transfer dyed in layers, rather than painted, though it has been done in a painterly way.  It needs stitch, but I haven't yet found the right thread...watch this space.

Playing on this scale, though, made me wonder what it would be like to work on a much smaller scale...and that led to these :

I see them as miniature abstracts, but they are also brooches.  I like the idea of being able to take art wherever you go, and enjoy it with others, rather than have it hung static on the wall.  The middle piece is an aberration; I have been playing about with needlefelting, and this was the result.  The rest, though, I'm pleased with. I've always liked working small, but this is smaller than I've done before at about two inches square; certainly no more than two inches in any one direction.

I've now made about forty of these, and they're going into my Etsy shop, slowly, together with some earrings, and more of them can be found in the Gallery, Dereham (next to the Memorial Hall).  I've got an idea for some that are a bit different to these... as you know, one thing always leads to another... I'll show you when I've worked it out.

I've got several favourites so far, but I do like this one; most of my buttons come from Incomparable Buttons these days, but this didn't.  I'd love to make my own, but there are limits (and I don't have a kiln).  So, I think I'll just continue to use the wonderful work of ceramicists.