Moths and butterflies

The Guild of Enamellers exhibition is up and running at the Pannett Art Gallery, it continues until 12 August 2012 and in the meantime I have gone back to working on a few ideas. For a while now I have been looking at moths and butterflies and how they are used as inspiration for jewellery. Some of the most striking examples are found in the Art Nouveau jewellery of the early 20th century and I was lucky to visit the museum of decorative arts in Paris recently and look at some beautiful pieces (sadly no photography allowed – and a very poor book available)!

Anyway, I am back working slowly on these ideas.

The wet weather means there haven’t been many butterflies in evidence in the garden this year but yesterday I was lucky to find a couple of ringlets in the polytunnel.

I was able to gently catch this one and it stayed quietly on my hand for some time, allowing me to really appreciate it’s beauty and observe how fluffy it’s body was and the fine lines of the structure of its wings. Eventually it flew off into the garden. Although this wasn’t a particularly vivid butterfly it has given me new inspiration and I will continue to work on my attempts to capture the essence of this ephemeral creature.

I have plenty of classes coming up – just get in contact if you would like to learn to make your own beautiful piece of silver or enamelled jewellery.