This month, for
Andrew Thornton's Inspired By Reading Book Club we read The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
It takes place in Sharon Springs, New York and is about two gentlemen farmers who have purchased and attempt to revitalize the Beekman Mansion and farm. It is a delightful story, well told by Josh. At times it seems a bit too focused on commercialization, but overall it is a great book with an important message: preserve the past. For me, that took the form of focusing on Josh's heirloom vegetable garden. I even sent for the Landreth Seed Catalogue and purchased a package of Josh's favorite heirloom tomato, Cherokee Purple.
Landreth seed catalogue of HEIRLOOM veggie and flower seeds
One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Josh, who was feeling down and overwhelmed on his 39th birthday sat in his garden alone and made a salad from all that was growing there.
"The bowel was brimming with every color imaginable and when I added a drizzle of olive oil, the colors seemed to magnify even more. The salad was so bright and cheerful that it actually made me smile for the first time in weeks. It was my birthday party in a bowel." (add quotation)
Back to the necklace:
About the same time I was thinking about what to make for the Book Club Reveal, I came across a notation in an Anthropologie ad that the model was wearing a Ladder Necklace. I searched Anthropologie and found the necklace and it then became a kind of obsession that I would have to make a ladder necklace myself. But once I got into figuring out the parts of the necklace, I realized that it was a bit more complicated that I was feeling I had time for so I tried to purchase some curved tubes but that didn't pan out either. But I did find some nice arched bails at JoAnn Fabrics that perhaps would do the trick.
Arched Bails JoAnn Fabrics--top one I was trying out some ideas
By then it was mid June and I was going to have to somehow meld my ladder necklace obsession and the Bucolic Plague into one necklace, which is what I did. I began to think about what a ladder could be related to a necklace concept of preservation and realized it could be a hierarchy or maybe a cross section of an idea. So I proceeded in that fashion using a Tomato Flower pendant I had recently made as the central focus of my idea.
I began to realize that the brown and black sticks I had wirewrapped and hung on one of the arched bails could be earth.
wire wrapped stones to represent fertile soil
And so it went on from there. I finished the necklace this morning but do still have to add the clasp.
The third rung of the ladder was my heirloom vegetable seeds that I preserved in little glass bottles that I wire wrapped and hung from the top bail on the necklace.
Wire wrapped bottle with heirloom veggie seeds: starting on the left: Detroit Dark Red Beets, French Breakfast Radish, Mache Corn Salad, Lemon Basil, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, Carrots scarlet Nantes, and Brandywine Tomato
All finished the necklace looks like this:
Preservation Necklace by Mary Harding
This was another great month in the Inspired by Reading Book Club. thank you Andrew for doing this. You can see what the others made HERE I will add the links later today.
