Former florist turned designer Susan McLeary has found a way to incorporate naturally occurring beauty into her jewelry designs: plants! The Ann Arbor, Michigan entrepreneur uses living, growing plants in a series of bracelets, necklaces, rings, and other baubles to put a new spin on natural beauty.
Passionflower, McLeary’s company, uses succulents for many of their pieces, obtaining them from locally sourced growers and greenhouses. Each piece is crafted by hand, with living plants placed on bases to create everything from tiaras to earrings.
Succulents are a hardy and longer lasting option, but McLeary uses flowers as well, and can create stunning, wearable pieces for weddings or other special occasions. While these conversation starters won’t last forever, many of the plants can be saved by relocating them to pots or your garden! With a wide array of colors and forms to choose from, McLeary has an almost infinite source of inspiration for her designs.
Another creative soul turning to nature for creating unique accessories is French artist Hubert Duprat. Duprat is embracing sustainable fashion and putting a new spin on natural beauty in a wholly different way. He uses insect larvae to create his designs. You read that right: Duprat creates pieces that work in harmony with the natural behaviors of caddisfly larvae.
Caddisflies are a common insect found in aquatic environments. They collect things like sand, gravel, and leaves to build shelters around themselves for protection. Using silk from their salivary glands to hold the structures together, these underwater architects then live in these protective tubes.
Duprat provides the caddisflies with items like bits of gold, gold leaf, tiny pearls, and other precious gems to enable the larvae to create glittering, bejeweled shelters that, once the larvae outgrows them, can be harvested and turned into a natural bit of wearable art. How’s that for sustainable design using naturally occurring beauty?
Check out this short video of the caddisfly making a new jewelry piece, and marvel at the unwitting creativity of these “artists”!
Featured Image from Ronit Shaked/Unsplash
