Quilled Lotus Flower Earrings with Pearls

Of course, while I was supposed to be working on dragon, I was instead taking breaks to quill other things.  I always find myself doing this ... I just can't stay focused on a single craft project at one time.  I always have multiple projects in the works.  I'm going to chalk it up to my ADD, which certainly helps one be creative, but can interfere with staying on task sometimes.

Anyway, I got the urge to make lotus flowers, even though I've never done it before.  I have a lot of books on meditation, many of them with different depictions of lotus flowers on the cover.  I decided to do something simple, and used a five petal design to mimic the flower.  To add some depth to them I used pearlized paper in two colors for each of the petals.  So the colors are white/grey, blue/green, and pink/lilac.  You can see the colors better in the inset images.

The pearl paper gave me the idea of making earrings using Swarovski pearls.  I make a lot of gemstone jewelry, and this seemed like a perfect way to use the flowers.  Except for that post I wrote earlier where I said I don't like to make quilled jewelry.  Well, I'm eating my words, here.

So I added an open circle to the bottom of each flower and used that to attach color coordinated Swarovski pearls in pink, purple, and white.  All the findings are silver or silver toned.  I really like the way they came out, very light and graceful.  I used a great deal of acrylic spray on them, hoping they will be able to stand up to some wear.  Now I just have to choose which pair I'm going to keep and which I'm giving away.

Image Credit:  My pix of my own quilling work, designs by me.