. . . an earring lovely as a tree. I must certainly apologize to Joyce Kilmer whose original work compared a poem to a tree. Didn’t many of us have to learn to recite those verses in school?
The last few days I’ve been working with tree shapes. It may be the anticipation of the changes soon to occur with the leaves on the trees or simply an inclination to get away from things that are circles. For whatever reason, I’ve been working with the shape of some trees, triangles. This is always a bit of a problem since triangular shapes in jewelry mean you must deal with three sharp corners, but I decided not to let that deter me.
The first trees are a bit large, yet interesting looking. These earrings are copper triangles sweat soldered together to imitate firs. The liver of sulphur patina seemed appropriate on these. I also made a smaller, upside down pair.
The next pair is made of copper that spent several days turning blue. The household concoction worked well and I didn’t want to spoil the color; therefore, I chose not to solder them. That would have removed the blue patina. I made them into pretty good swingers by using the copper rings.
The last pair of earrings initiated with a picture of a pair that a friend gave me. I intended to use silver circles as part of the embellishment, but the bottle caps sitting on the work bench begged to be used. The star in the cold connection adds a little western flair to this pair. Yes, I do realize that this tree shape is upside down, but it seemed like the way to go.
Maybe the next tree shapes should be rounded at the top – I’ll have to give that some thought.
In the last line of her tree poem, Kilmer wrote:
Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.
I could certainly say the same about these silly earrings.