We're All Ears: March 2014

Once again it's time for the We're All Ears challenge hosted by Earrings Everyday.  Each month the editors will share an inspiration piece on the first Friday of the month.  Anyone can join in and reveal a pair of earrings that they created on the third Friday of the month.  It's super easy to play along!  Here is what they shared with us this month:

Pen and watercolor by Beatrix Potter
from The Tailor of Gloucester from the collection at the Tate Museum

Can it get more sweet and adorable than that?  Like many of us, I grew up with the Beatrix Potter tales and just love the illustrations and the stories.  I'm a youth services librarian in a public library, so I have special affection for an inspiration piece pulled from a beloved children's classic.  (Although the practical side of me does wish that they would publish these books in a larger format...they are usually quite tiny at ???... but I digress!)

I decided to try something a little outside of my normal comfort zone this month and and work with fibers.  To play off the idea of the mouse's needle and thread I used waxed Irish linen.  I chose little Czech glass flowers in pale pink and turquoise to mimic the fabric in Potter's illustration and knotted them onto royal blue waxed Irish linen. (If I had any pink I probably would have gone that route, but I made do with the colors that I had on hand.)  I used a Czech glass cruller in deeper pink right under the ear wire to pick up the color of the thread in the picture.

At that point I thought I was going to be done, but the earrings didn't seem quite balanced.  My husband thought that the threads were too long and that part looked "too skinny."  To fill things out (and avoid cutting the thread off and the effort of attempting another round of even knots) I added a little daisy charm to each earring.  Well, that's enough talking... here's the finished design!

Thanks for stopping by my blog today!  You can check out what everyone else made over on Earrings Everyday HERE.