laurieopal

Every year I design a pendant from a previous guest of honor's work. They include among others, Ursula Le Guin, Nisi Shawl and Vonda MacIntyre.

This year's pendant is from The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar. A friend gave her 30 different kinds of honey and she wrote about each of them in the book. I hear her read at last Wiscon and was very inspired by her writing. I chose Cranberry Creamed Honey because I could visualize a design that I loved. The leaf is a flame. The pendant is sterling and measures about an inch.


"DAY 5 Cranberry Creamed Honey Colour: Dark amber, cognac. Funny to me how I have such boozy associations, but they are apt. Smell: There’s a sharpness, a resinousness to this. It’s also very liquidy. Taste: A definite cranberry tartness, but the honey taste dominates; the tartness limns it, darts around its edges, makes it one of the more refreshing honeys I’ve tried.   I think of pine, strangely, redwood; tasting it is like walking a forest path.  
 ..  There is fire in his wrists, fire in his sharp-shod walk, fire beneath his fingernails. He is red, redder than rowan berries, for rowan doesn’t bleed as cranberries do, and it is cranberries that he gathers, that he stews and crushes, cranberries in which he steeps his skin. Lacking a Mithrasian bull, he takes them, bathes in them, rinses his hair red-black, seeking transcendence.."  ..