Ininti seeds

I only recently found out about these amazing seeds that are native to the north and north east deserts of Australia.

A friend asked me to make her several pieces of jewellery incorporating my silver work with the seeds and other elements. We have chosen freshwater pearls and lapis lazuli to start playing with ideas to see how it all works.

We have come up with some ideas but in the meantime I’ve made up these little red Ininti seed earrings combining them with a solid Sterling silver bead and freshwater pearl. They are quite delicate with just a little bit of drop (35mm length) to dangle from your earlobe. There will be more to come.

These would make a lovely addition to your Christmas wardrobe - order your pair now in time for Christmas.

A bit more about the seeds… 

Jewellery is an important part of Aboriginal culture. Aboriginal women pick up these beautifully coloured beads when foraging for food and use them to make jewellery. They use a stick heated in a fire to burn holes into the seeds. Traditionally they would string the beads onto long strands of string hand spun from human hair. These body ornaments were worn in harnesses over the shoulder, across the chest and under the arms. Strands of beads were also worn as a headband to hold feather headdresses in place. 

The seeds come from the Bat-wing Coral tree, which gets its name from the unique shape of the leaves. Aborigines have used the timber for thousands of years for making Coolamons and Woomeras because it is easy to carve, light to carry and can be used to start fires with friction. The tree was also used medicinally, the bark apparently used as a sedative. The seeds come in a range of colours: shades of red, brown, orange and cream.

The seeds are toxic if swallowed so they need to be kept away from young children who may swallow them accidentally.

Our kintsugi journey

So the Goose and I decided to give this kintsugi technique a bit of a go when a friend said she had this little broken tea cup.

First we found and purchased a kit from a Japanese supplier. I just love Etsy – not only as a great platform to display and sell my hand crafted work but as a source for all sorts of things.

This arrived pretty promptly because they only ship express (costs of course) due to lost parcels – oops Australia Post!

The day we decided to do this it was over 30 degress. Yes it was unseasonally warm for Adelaide as we are technically in autumn and temps should be low 20s at this time. However warm day it was and probably not the best day to mix up a paste of flour, water and low allergenic Japanese Urushi lacquer. You mix it to a stiff paste and it is quite hard to work with. Also the gloves they included in the kit were too big. They kept getting in the way but the pieces of the broken tea cup came together really well.

The good news is though that while urushi lacquer is like poison ivy and brings you out in a rash I’m not allergic to it. I was able to dispense with the gloves and use my fingers to clean up the bits of paste that were going everywhere.

Once I’d “glued” the pieces back together with the urushi paste and cleaned up the pieces I put the whole tea cup into a muro. This is a highly technical piece of equipment – cardboard (or plastic) box with a lid, a damp towel and some chopsticks. The chopsticks form a framework to sit the glued piece on and these sit on top of the damp towel. You ensure the box is covered and kept in a cool place for 10-14 days then you wait. At the end of the 14 days the piece will be dry and firmly glued.

The little teacup came out well. You can use a fine grade of sandpaper to file back any little nicks or lumps in the join and to remove any spots where you may not have cleaned the paste off – but it’s better to clean that off before it dries fully.

On to stage 2!

This involves mixing another flour paste with Neri Bengara. This time it wasn’t such a hot day and the paste worked a little better. This mixture gets painted over the “glued” crack. You need to paint a very fine line over the crack as you don’t want it to be thick and lumpy. This turns out to be much more difficult than expected mainly because you are working with such a small piece of pottery with a hairline crack. Tricky.

Once the crack is covered it sits for about a half an hour in the muro. You then dust the join with gold or silver powder; then gently brush the excess from around the join (not touching the join). Back into the muro, this time upside down to keep the gold powder on the join across the base of the teacup.

Another week later and it’s out of the muro for good now. I brushed off any excess gold powder and there it was – finished and like new but in some ways better.

Ok so the line is a little wonky in places and a bit uneven but it looks good.

Would I do anything differently?

Yes – pick a cooler day to work with the pastes and use a finer brush to paint the neri bengara over the join but otherwise it’s like a lot of hand skills – it requires practice. I'm really looking forward to doing some more kintsugi repairs. I have some great ideas for jewellery pieces with kintsugi features and will post them as I work on them.

If you have a special piece that is broken I'd love to repair it for you so you can experience the special art of Kintsugi.

Have you heard of kintsugi?

Also known as Kintsukuroi, Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise (Wikipedia).

I had heard of it but hadn’t particularly taken much notice about it except I have seen some beautiful examples of repairs using this technique.

As a concept I love it. I have a rather sweet little pottery vase thing that has a very fine fluted edge with a silver rim. During one of my many moves years ago the edge was damaged. I managed to keep a few of the pieces and they sit at the bottom of the vase. They have been there for years without much thought until recently.

A couple of weeks ago a friend messaged me to ask if I was using Kintsugi at all. I told her I wasn’t but I would try to find someone who did. Well within an hour or so I’d found a contact through another contact but during the process I started to investigate the technique. Well, you can’t hold my curiosity back and soon I was watching YouTube videos on the process.

During my research I’ve discovered that there are a number of ways you can perform this technique. The easy way is to buy some heavy-duty glue, mix some metal powder into that and stick the pieces together. Doesn’t take long but not sure that it’s the best way and certainly some of the examples I found of this technique looked amateurish to say the least.

So, on to a couple of videos of the more traditional technique. First was done by an American who is using the traditional Japanese techniques and materials. He also supplies them and runs workshops around the world. Then I found a Japanese company that supplies the materials.

I have to say I’m fascinated and while I’m sure there is a great deal of skill that could take a long time to learn fully I’m super keen to try this out.

So here we go. I’ve found the videos that show me how to do it, can get the materials from Japan and have a couple of small projects to practice one.

A couple of days after all this I was walking along the beach and found a small selection of broken pieces of pottery… I think the universe might be telling me something here. So, here’s a few questions – do you like Kintsugi?

If you had any broken pottery pieces that you particularly loved and wanted repaired would you like me to have a go at them?

Would you like jewellery made using this technique?

I’d really love to hear your ideas on this. Please message me or leave a comment below telling me your thoughts on this.

Broken beach finds - ideal for silver kintsugi project?

Kintsugi repair - if you search Google or Pinterest you will find this and many other beautiful examples of Kintsugi.

Parcels in the post.

So excited. My doorbell’s just rung and the postie has been. Who would have thought anyone could get that excited about receiving a small tool and a few silver beads and charms but I do. I’ve been tracking these little parcels ever since I placed the order just on two weeks ago. Sometimes the wait is agonising and sometimes it just fills you with anticipation and excitement. This time the two parcels disappeared into the “in transit” ether with no updates since clearing their respective countries. One parcel was coming from Thailand and the other from Redwood City in the USA. So it’s really exciting when this morning having checked the status, once again showing the mysterious “in transit”, to find both parcels suddenly on my doorstep. Woohoo I love it.

I must admit that as a shopper I do love the immediacy of walking into a store, selecting the goods I want, paying for them and heading home to enjoy them right now. But I’ve been shopping online for a number of years and love the anticipation of waiting for my goodies to arrive. It seems to enhance the experience a little in some ways.

I really really prefer to support local businesses where I can. Unfortunately given our relatively small population in Australia and our distance from many markets leaves me shopping online for items I’d rather purchase in Australia – specially jewellery tools and supplies that aren’t manufactured here and that I can’t manufacture myself.

Do you love internet shopping?

Our house guests...

Isn’t this little fella gorgeous? He’s a very rare golden possum and I found this article about him in a recent National Trust newsletter. Fortunately or unfortunately he isn’t the type of possum that has taken up residence at our house. Ours is a common brushtail. Luckily for us she, as it turns out, took up residence in our carport. Lucky because you really don’t want a possum living in your roof, rare or otherwise and because they are territorial it is very difficult to move them along.

We discovered she was a she when the one tail we could see hanging down from a drainpipe at the back of the carport suddenly became two tails, one much smaller. I’ve posted photos of the tail(s) but it’s hard to see what they belong to. Sometimes we’ve been lucky enough to see a claw hanging down too but tails and claws are usually retracted whenever we walk up to say hello.

As the little one is getting bigger we’ve seen them both out at night feeding off the buds and blossoms on the big trees in the garden next door. Sometimes the mum is carrying the bubs on her back and sometimes they are moving independently. Whilst I’m not that happy about having to clean up possum poop from my backyard, in some ways its quite nice having nature that close to us in such a dense urban environment. I’m not sure if they are here to stay permanently or whether as the little one grows up they will move on to someone else’s carport!

The original Silver Goose...

This is the original Silver Goose.

I've always loved jewellery and my thing has been to buy a pair of earrings everywhere I've travelled to. I have a pair of beautiful jade Maori fish hooks from Queenstown, NZ; little silver and coral stone earrings from Peru; titanium frogs from Darwin and lots of others I have collected over the years.

So it was an easy transition to making Sterling silver jewellery once I had done a training course. While I was doing the course I saw the most amazing sculpture in the window of The Jam Factory in Adelaide. It was at least a metre tall and was a goose in black boots, the boots were on backwards. It was cute, funky and out there. I loved it. I wondered how this might work in silver and decided to make a brooch for myself to try it out.

I think he came out well and I love him... so he is not for sale but he was part of the inspiration to sell my fun and quirky silver creations to my friends. The Goose and I are having fun and this quirky enterprise is also proving very successful.

Leafy Seadragon, Phycodurus eques (Günther, 1865)

I just love these gorgeous little creatures. Unfortunately when I was diving many years ago I never had the good fortune to see one in the wild but I'd love to hear your story if you have seen one...

The Leafy Seadragon, also known as Glauert’s Sea-dragon is a spectacular creature, with its elaborate leafy appendages and amazing colour pattern it is superbly camouflaged amongst kelp. It has a long tubular snout, a pectoral fin on its "neck" and a dorsal fin on its "back".

It is found on rocky reefs in depths from about 3m to 50m from Kangaroo Island, South Australia to south-western Western Australia.

It is protected throughout its range in Australia, and is the marine emblem for South Australia.

Recent media reports suggest the rare and mysterious leafy seadragon Is disappearing from South Australian waters partly due to environmental factors and human intervention.

My studio

My studio is in my home in the western suburbs of Adelaide and this is the view on a warm sunny day... the play of light and shadows is fantastic throughout the day!

Bubbles and Baubles event

This week we held the first Bubbles and Baubles event. Hosted by my delightful sailing friend Sue a few of our close friends and relatives enjoyed catching up and viewing some of my work. I think everyone enjoyed themselves and a few hand made pieces will be loved by their new owners. For those who missed out we'll be organising another one soon. If you would like to join us please email me your details and I'll let you know of upcoming events.

Flying Duck Orchid, Caleana major

This orchid is amazing - about 50 cm tall, it grows in eastern and southern Australia. It so looks just like a male duck in flight! Nature just amazes and inspires me... I'm thinking earrings or a brooch to rival the goose!

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