Inspired by Reading: May 2019 Reveal...

We have a book club at Allegory Gallery and it’s a lot of fun. It’s called, “Inspired by Reading”. In a lot of ways, it’s like most book clubs; we read a book and then get together once a month to talk about it... but our book club has a twist! After participants finish the book, they are asked to make something inspired by what they read (or in my case, listened to on Audible)! It could be food or jewelry or anything really. One time a person made beer and another time, someone else embellished a pair of shoes!

"The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore.

For May, we read, “The Radium Girls” by Kate Moore. Almost everyone agreed that the book was fascinating and well-written, albeit disturbing. It was made all the more disturbing knowing that the book was based on real people! I don't tend to read a lot of non-fiction for pleasure, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way that the author was entertaining without being flippant and did a wonderful job fleshing out the characters. She did a wonderful job making them seem like the real people that they were.

Shine Bright Earrings by Andrew Thornton.

I had a lot of ideas of what to make, but not a lot of time. So I decided to make a pair of earrings and focus on the verdant green from the cover and the idea of the luminous, glowing quality of the radium.

Shine Bright Earrings under a UV black light.

I had these vintage German glass cabochons in a lovely, glowy shade of green and I decided to bezel set them. In the book, the author mentions that several of the characters are of German descent and I thought that using the German glass was fitting. Before I set the cabochons though, I painted the interior of the bezel that I made out of sterling silver with glow-in-the-dark paint.

Shine Bright Earrings in the dark after being "charged up".

I then smashed an antique Czech glass “Vaseline” bead and used liquid polymer clay as a binder to glue the glass crumbs in the bottoms of the bezels. The cabochons were set on top of that. Some vaseline glass is made with uranium salts. This gives a unique, vibrant yellow to the glass and under a black light, they glow! (Don’t worry! They’re not dangerously radioactive.)

On the backs, I stamped, “shine bright”. Since the book has a darker theme, I wanted to stamp something that was relevant, but a tad bit more on the positive affirmation side. I thought about doing "Lip... Dip... Paint." but then I thought that if I ever wanted to sell these, that maybe that was a wee bit too specific. The set cabochons were then dangled from sterling silver lever back earwires.

To see all the other delightful creations inspired by "The Radium Girls" (and all our other book selections), CLICK HERE to visit our Facebook page for the book club. CLICK HERE to see all of this year's selections. Up next for June is "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler.