Blue Cottage: MATCHING EARRINGS

I made these earrings from sterling silver to match my sunflower pendant design in my last blog post.

SPECIAL COMMISSION: a customer asked me to design a pendant for her sister's 60th birthday. She said she had been looking for something special for the occasion in silver but could not find what she wanted. She told me her sister loves sunflowers. Well - she had definitely come to the right person there then!

IDEAS: I asked her for some general jewellery pictures of what she did like and some photos of items she didn't like and asked her to explain why she liked them or didn't like them. Working around her preferences & dislikes, I designed the pendant from the last blog and these earrings to match the pendant.

FASTENING: As the lady is 60 yrs of age I thought she might have difficulty in fastening a chain as even I find chains fiddly when you can't see what you are doing. Therefore, I decided to use this idea below which makes it much easier to fasten and unlikely to come apart accidently.

BELOW: This is the sunflower on the pendant. It is relatively heavy being solid and made from sterling silver but this is advantageous as its weight makes it sit centrally on the chain between the 2 side twiddly decorations and it doesn't slide around easily as the person moves.

Below: the twiddly chain decorations of my own design idea.

BRIEF: I was fortunate to have a completely open brief with which to work & only the sunflower as the constant - a designer's dream! I am not exactly short of personal photographs of my favourite flower too - the sunflower! I adore sunflowers at all stages of the day & am intrigued by the way they follow the sun. Using my own photos & ideas, I created a few different designs and started to work, making alterations as I went along. These were the result of many hours of patient work in the studio.