One of the challenges (and delights!) of making jewelry is that I am fascinated by so many different processes.  I want to try them all!  This spring I have continued to work with alcohol inks, and I'll highlight some of those pieces in a future post.  But this spring I also discovered the joy of working with paper.  I've written about working with William Morris prints, but I've also been exploring some other papers that have turned into interesting earrings.  

In 2016 I visited the oldest paper shop in Florence, now owned by the 6th generation of the family who founded it in 1863.  I saw how they hand-marbled their lovely papers, bought a few sheets, and then carried them with me in my moves from Spokane to California to Vermont -- but I had never used them.  This spring I looked at them with a fresh eye, and created these:  they are reversible, with a different part of the print on each side.  They are challenging to match, because the nature of marbled paper is an incredible variety of swirls and colors, so it's hard to find two areas that really do work together:

But no sooner had I made these WHEN.....

....I found a box with each of the Christmas cards my parents had sent since the early 1980's -- and I'll never use those -- but there were a lot of the extras as well. My mother always chose cards with scenes from medieval manuscripts, with their marvelous decorative borders.  These are from 15th century French illuminated manuscripts:

And suddenly I thought "They would make darling earrings!"

So now I'm working on a small series of "medieval manuscript"earrings!  And because these first ones have come from the manuscript borders, I've kept them to a rectangular shape, but I'll start to experiment with different shapes.  

This may be the summer of paper and alcohol inks!

Elizabeth