Let's go For a swim at Kalithea

This is one of my favourite places to instantly melt any cares away. Over these few years we have seen the Spar be restored to it's former glory and eaten lots of tzatziki in the little cafe overlooking the beach and it's straw parasols. The most blissful hours have been spent in the cooling waters on baking hot days, encircling the volcanic rocks and spying crabs and colourful fish.

The traditional Spar, now restored

The baking hot beach-too hot to stand on the sand!

Lovely textures of volcanic rocks where gases bubbled and the shells of  prehistoric sea creatures fused with them.

Shell mosaic made from pebbles in the floor of the spar

Mosaics in the spar carry motifs from the sea and beach around it.  I also found inspiration in the shapes of these sea creatures to create a special present.

I incorporated sand from the beach we all visited together into a pair of cuff-links. The two shapes are taken from my cast of a real pre-historic ammonite, and a perfect pink shell I found on the beach on our holiday.

I hope this present is a little reminder of the wonderful holidays we have spent so far, to carry a bit of those happy times away with us.

Silver & resin cuff-links, using sand from the beach in Greece.

Seashells Sanctuary

Shell shapes are amazing and varied. These beautiful calcareous sculptures are each a bespoke outfit for an individual soft bodied sea creature...

Damien Hirst, "Forms Without Life" 1991

Some new rings in methods inspired by the beautiful lumicella rock which contains prehistoric sea shells.

Joanne Stoker's shapely seashell shoe-styles appeal to me!

Keep an eye out for these new rings arriving in the SHOP! 

Underground Paris - A Journey through Space & Time

Invitation to a Journey through Space and Time

I had my first chance to explore the re-opened Catacombs under Paris in December. We were lucky enough to visit when such a unique place, full of natural history as well as the macabre structures of human bones was eerily quiet as the minus temperatures above chilled the city air.

"Between street level and the bottom of the Catacombs, the visitor is taken back nearly 45 million years in time. You go through a succession of increasingly ancient layers of rock until you reach a bed of limestone whih corresponds to a geological period called the "Lutetian" (between 48 and 40 million years ago)."

"The Quarryman's foot-bath"

"This period was first identified in Paris called "Lutetian" after the ancient name for Paris, Lutetia. The official reference profile (GSSP) for Lutetian is located in the catacombs, at the water-well that bears the name Bain de pieds des carriers ("The Quarrymen's Foot-bath")."

"The Lutetian doesn't actually account for very much time in the history of the Earth, which is 4,500 million years old. The dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, while modern Man has only been developing for 200 000 years,"

natural strata and man made supports above

You can read up on the Catacombs of Paris here and there will be a second more grisly post to follow...