So my mother-in-law is an antique dealer, loves any & everything from France, lives in the Windy City, which is freezing cold right now, and just had a birthday. She usually gets some kind of antique bird figurine, which she collects, as a gift from me. I wanted to make her something special this year, so I went antiquing (treasure hunting) and found this French 'Warmer'. It's a version of those long-handled things they'd fill with hot coals and slide between the sheets to warm up the bed, back in the days before indoor heat. Perfect. It's from France and it symbolizes 'warmth'. So I wrapped a gray ribbon around the ugly yellow handle and played around with how to decorate it.
Then I started poking things through the holes to see what would fit. Shower curtain hooks worked nicely and let me hang something off the bottom of them.
That's when I came up with the idea of turning it into wind chimes. Get it… Windy City…. (sometimes I just kill myself, I'm so clever! :-) So I used some chain (with pretty beads) and heavy metal hooks and washers, wanting to make a purposeful clanking against a set of cheap old wind chimes I had, and stand up to 'real' wind.
I wrapped the top of the chimes in steel and hung a substantial 'strike bar' from an old gate latch down the middle, surrounded by those hollow tubes. Wanting to cover up the top of the strike bar, I was playing around, trying different pieces of junk in my studio and found this broken watch with a 'Mother of Pearl' stretchy band and little gems in the same colors as my beads. Weird, but kind of cool.
Adding some rusty old concrete nails all around the warmer, to symbolize sunshine (more warmth).
I then talked my husband, who is a novice jewelry maker/designer, into creating some kind of a bird (I'm nothing if not consistent) for the center. He made this lovely cloisonne (French) songbird in enamel on copper. Isn't it beautiful?
Here is the completed piece and it sounded really awesome. With my 'hella' packing job, it made it to Chicago in one piece and she loved it! I only wish I could repeat it and make one for me now :-)
