Leather flowers, part one: earrings

I’ve been playing with leather lately. These little flower earrings have been sitting here, almost finished, for about a month. I finally got it together to poke a little hole in them so an earring wire could go through, and now they’re done. Ten seconds of work. Why is it so easy to get 90 percent done with something and then just let it park there on the work table for four weeks? I’ve been moving these around to make room for something else for ages. I don’t know what that’s about.

These are small, maybe an inch across. In my head, leather jewelry is so 1970’s, and there is almost nothing I love more than that. These are begging for a long patchwork skirt and maybe a big bracelet made of cowrie shells. Boots, for sure. I’m thinking of my second grade teacher, Mrs. Lorenz, who was a beautiful hippie with fringed vests and long red hair and dangly earrings that looked like tiger teeth or maybe bear claws or something. She made a pillow out of an entire pair of old jeans (I mean it; she just sewed up the cuffs and stuffed them) and she let me borrow her Monkees records. Her class is where I first heard The Lovin’ Spoonful. Awesome. She potted up twenty spider plants in recycled peanut butter jars and gave them to us for Christmas. She’d totally wear these. Anyway, I used tiny scraps of leather from my stash of somebody else’s leftovers, purchased twenty years ago for another purpose. Save everything, people! The lovely tutorial is here.

I am also illuminating the Great Lakes and most of the Eastern Seaboard with work on the granny blanket, which is still frustratingly in the Lemongrass Phase of construction. This yarn badly needs the tempering of a neighboring hue.

It looks so innocent there in the sunlight. Do not be fooled.