The Enchantress of Florence / Difficult Loves- Inspired by Reading Book Club

It's time once again for one of my favorite monthly design challenges... the Inspired by Reading Book Club!  This group was founded and organized by Andrew Thornton and you can read more about the group and see the rest of the 2013/2014 booklist HERE.  He recently announced the lineup for 2014/2015 and you check that out HERE.  Anyone can join... just read the month's book and create something, anything to share on the reveal date (usually the last Wednesday of the month although we sometimes switch things around like this month with two reveals together).

The January selection for the book club was The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.  I was intrigued from the start by the idea of the Enchantress but, boy, does she take a long time to show up!

I will be the first to admit that this title ended up being a little bit outside my comfort zone.  While I agree with some of the conversation over on our group's Facebook page that there is a lot of rich imagery here, I just couldn't get the plot to really gel for me.  There were so many threads to the story and so many names that I just found myself glossing over things in many places.  By the end of the book I appreciated how all the threads came together, but this isn't a book that I'll be rushing to recommend to folks.

I was really struck by the idea of Argalia the Turk, the mighty warrior with his secret, more feminine side.  I loved the idea of this tough man who insisted that all his underthings be embroidered with tulips and had tattooed tulips all over his body.  I had an idea for doing something with the either the Vintaj Flourish petal or bead cap (maybe even both) since they look so much like tulip petals to me.  Unfortunately, I ran out of time to mess around with that idea but maybe I'll revisit it a a later date when I have more time to fiddle with it.

So, onto plan B.  Luckily, I had an embossed Vintaj copper blank that featured part of the design from the India Archway die sitting around from my last big round of playing with my BigKick.  I had used a mix of fuchsia and orange paints that fit with my idea of the colors of India.  Once I wrapped a piece of filigree around my painted square I had my pendant and my starting place for my design.  

Per my usual process, I pulled out a ton of possible bead choices that fit with the colors of the pendant.  Once I whittled things down, I had some fun and bright dyed howlite rondelles, some fushcia cyrstal rounds, and some bright orange Czech glass.  To keep things from being over the top bright and to bring out the copper tones from the pendant, I added in several sparkly goldstone rounds.  (FYI both the goldstone and the crystal came from some of Andrew's destash events.)

I didn't want to totally abandon the idea of flowers... I used a couple of different flower beads as well as a variety of bead caps that had a flowery feel to them.  Wire wrapping a little orange glass flower to the jump ring above the pendant gives it a little something different than what I've done before and I hope that the lucite flower dangle that I added to the clasp helps balance out the design.

February's selection is collection of short stories, Difficult Loves by Italio Calvino.  The stories were written in the 1940's and 50's and are translated from the Italian.  I don't know if this makes sense or not, but they felt translated to me... that there was something in the prose that just felt foreign to my American ears.

The cover of my copy was NOT this attractive.

I didn't even try to read them all (I'm never going to be a huge short story fan) but the ones that resonated the most with me all came from the "Riviera Stories" section of the book.  Many of them were tinged with just a touch of magical realism that hooked my imagination.

I chose to make something in response to "The Enchanted Garden."  In this story, two children sneak into a garden through a hole they find in the hedge.  Once inside the garden they pick flowers, swim in a pool, and eat tea and cake before sneaking back out.  Before they leave they also spy a pale boy inside the house in a beautiful room filled with collections of butterflies on the walls.  The children are unable to really enjoy the experience because of the shadows cast by their fear of being caught.

I ended up making two necklaces that are variations on a design that I call my "Secret Garden" necklaces.  For both of them I drew on the colors of the swimming pool and added flowers and in one case a leaf for the garden itself.  One of them features a butterfly charm for the pale (sickly?) boys collections and the other has a bird in flight for the sparrows that the children spook on their way into the garden.

I think it was the act of crawling through the hedge into the enchanted garden that really caught my attention.  As a child my friends and I had a whole world carved out in the space that ran between our backyards and the yards on the street behind us (We called it the T section, don't ask me why).  The neighbors directly behind my house had a thick boxwood hedge that did have a hole in it where we would crawl inside and could see their gardens and pool.  There was no hole in that fence for us to crawl through, but the idea just felt so familiar to me.

This is a blog hop.  Please take some time to see what everyone else created over the last two months!

Sarajo Wentling  (that's me!)

Jeanne Steck

Mary Harding

Ann Schroeder

Rachel Stewart

Andrew Thornton, Laurel Ross, Alison Smith, Terri Greenawalt