Melanie Brooks of Earthenwood has been making really cool stuff for a very long time. My latest acquisition is this wonderful pair of pendants, part of her steampunk line, featuring an antique key and keyhole. Our current house has some wonderful escutcheons, though the matching skeleton keys have long since been lost or replaced. However, I was lucky enough to grow up in a similiar style of house as a child—the Dutch colonial I grew up in Highland Park was built in 1918, and this place in ’24—and when I was small my parents still had at least one door that opened with an old-fashioned key, as shown here.
about 42x5.5mm. 2008 or 2009. Well, ok, this is a highly romanticized version. But it was a real-honest-to-goodness skeleton key!
These have been sitting on the giftwrap table for ages, patiently waiting for me to photograph them (the giftwrapping area and photography “studio” are next to each other in the basement). Finally, last fall, I took apart some cassettes and cleaned them[1] , and perhaps a month ago, I put them away where I could find them, and today, I dug them out to style with Melanie's work.
The ultimate plan, of course is to make something with all these cogs and pendants, but given that it's probably taken me, um, 9 months or more to photograph the pieces, it could be awhile...
photo, file, 14jan10.
[1]bicycling is not only cheap and fun, it also yields way better components for artists than cars do—chain, cogs, brake cables...I mean, when was the last time you wanted to take home your broken car parts or used oil filter?
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
