Frank's pin

(this is another one of those "do not adjust your screen" blurry photos. I am having a bear [ha!] of a time photographing the jewelry I make. I probably should take a class in photographing jewelry, as I've seen some nice examples over at Etsy...)

So I promised Frank a long time ago I would make him a pin, and for his birthday last month, I made good on that promise--sort of. You see, the project was originally envisioned to be a bear outlined in copper wire, looking something like this, from the Bear Taxon Advisory Workgroup site:



But, as with so many of my projects, the problem turned out to be scale--it was a lot easier to sculpt copper wire at the original size than at the roughly 1/4th-size that would be more appropriate for a pin. So, under those selective pressures, the bear evolved into a neuron, which now sits on my bookcase, and Frank was still pin-less.



Emma was encouraging that, even if it didn't fit the original vision, Frank would treasure a homemade gift from me, so I made a couple of tactical revisions in order to get it done in time for his birthday. Because he's such a cat-lover, it seemed like it would be ok to swap the ursine theme for a feline one, and when I saw this big leopard face at Ben Franklin, it was so appealing that I decided ready-made, in place of home-sculpted, would be ok.

I went with yellow and black beads to reinforce the "leopard" theme, and this is the finished product, although it didn't photograph well:



It looks focused in the viewfinder, but then the flash on the beads or something else unfocuses it--I'm not sure what the problem is.

I'm happy with the pin, in a kind of Grandma Moses naive way, but I want to drive my style to end up ultimately in a different place. I don't think this will be representative of my future work.

Frank loved his homemade birthday pin, but I still want to try to carry out the original vision one of these days as well.