Our first project for jewelry studio involved choosing a random envelope filled with a mystery material. The envelope I chose contained one side of the top of a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. One of the goals of the project was to get us into working quickly, however, I spent several hours with "maker's block", not knowing what direction to proceed in. After finally coming up with some loose ideas I just started deconstructing the piece of fabric and seeing what I could do with the resulting components. There was an embroidered swan, a couple of double stitched curved sections that had once framed the pockets, white thin material, heavier light blue denim, and a couple of snap rivets.
After a lot of false starts and making of items that held little to no appeal to me I decided to stop working with the selected material as cloth, but rather to take it apart and use the material as threads instead. This led to some appealing parts, especially the first necklace component produced, when I was still under the impression that time was not a constraint. What I did with the threads that resulted from totally fraying the fabric was to make skimpy pom-poms and then flatten them out and hold them together with cut out shapes from the white pocket lining that were stitched over the threads. I chose to use a heavy red thread for the stitching because it seemed as if the relatively quiet blue and white colors needed a little excitement. After making the first section I remembered some really fuzzy feathers I'd gathered in the chicken coop that morning that were reminiscent of the texture created by the frayed pom-pons, so those went into one of the components as well. They were set into a circular shape and stitched together with some of the lining material.
