Northern Exposure

A friend of mine in Alaska sent me a few strips of birch bark recently.  As soon as I pulled them from the box she shipped them in, I knew they were destined to be pieces of jewelry.  Last week, I used a dash of birch bark in a necklace design!  Pure, natural, organic, soulful magic.

This pendant features a hollow form sterling structure with birch bark set under resin on the surface.  Dropping down from it is one of my sterling twirlygigs with an enameled feather in chartreuse.  A bit of pearl appears on a silk cord as well as a wee hunk of coral.

It’s Northern Exposure.
Don’t it feel good?
There’s a chill in the air.
The nights grow longer in leaps and bounds and 
up in the sky the northern lights comb neon fingers through the stars.


What does it mean to me, working with birch bark?
It brings me closer to the home I miss so much, my home in Canada, and more specifically, Northern Saskatchewan and the chain lakes and river systems that bury Precambrian shield in icy waters.  There, along the shore, grow the jack pine and the birch.  In such a silent place of deeply carpeted, dark forest, the birch tree brings lightness; lightness of being, lightness where there is so much dark.  And in that light, that delicate filtering of sunlight down to forest floor, is hope, growth and green.


Can you see it?
I can.


xx
Plume