Some more Longshore Drifter jewellery making its way north and me collecting the greywacke and schist pebbles at Okarito Beach. Thanks Wayne for the photos of Okarito.

These tiny Okarito pebbles were collected during my last trip to NZ. When we 1st arrived at Okarito Beach which is renowned for its alpine views, a big storm had been through and instead of Alps, we found Falps- F for foam. This kept Wayne busy with the camera for some time chuckling away at his pun.

Okarito is a sad place for me and it was difficult making these pieces, even after a year. But as photos help me remember, the morning after the terrible storm, the weather cleared and the alps revealed themselves as I took tea on the beach and managed a smile. And there were the lenticular clouds, lenses of icecrystals, always forming in the path of turbulence. Or in the case of New Zealand, always forming!

You Boats

This is a new brooch to go up to Umbrella Collective show at Kick Arts. Made from Orepuki pebbles, cuttlefish cast silver, 18 and 24 K gold. The little word flipper says LOOK and FIND. The U in 24 K gold refers to U boats or my pun, You Boats: the way we carry our baggage in bathtub like vessels on perilous journeys to nowhere very much but the stuff we hold precious is beautiful and interesting and often gets us sunk along the way.

So it is a "Look and Find U Boat". I was thinking of the German U boats (underwater submarine type things) suicidally sunk in Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands North of mainland Scotland at the end of WWI. Sunk by the Germans rather than letting the Brits get them, they are now the worlds largest reserve of non-radio active steel as they were submerged before the nuclear age and the steel is protected by being underwater. Now they are harvested for space exploration. How do I know this? Well I once took a tour of the Orkney Islands with Mad Uncle Mike who filmed the entire thing in real time.