I made this necklace years ago at some sort of retreat I went to in lieu of Gathering. I think. Since the last time I went to Gathering was in 2007, that means this thing is at least a decade old. It's, um, taken me awhile to get around to photographing it.

Glass, leather. Mid 2000s? The largest bead measures approximately 30mm across. Sodalime/effetre.

And it would still probably be waiting in the queue, but someone wanted to borrow my lensbaby, and while she was an experienced photographer (more than I am, actually...) she'd never used this lens, which is of course is completely manual. Nor the particular camera body (Olympus E620, which is a four-thirds mount); plus we had a little palaver about my manual flash, which she thought would actually be simpler to use, since there's no need to go trawling through a bunch of menus—it's got 4 buttons on the back (and I typically only use 2 of them) —which since use the flash to with mostly manual settings anyway, it quite a bit easier.^[1]

This image was styled to emphasize the point focus of the lensbaby.

There's not a lot else to say, except that I obviously used big-hole mandrels to make these beads. Also, I'm not very good at making big-hole mandrel beads:) Or making dogwood bracts^[2] , since I forgot to put the notch in them.^[3]

Just for fun, here's some real dogwood, shot about the same time as the necklace:)

White dogwood, cornus floridus. Possibly my favourite flowering tree. Certainly my favourite native.

And here's a pink version:

This species comes in three colours: white, pink and red. The red in particular tend to have smaller blooms. /SonyRX100/2016RX/20160512RX

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.