Coneflowers

I first came across coneflowers when we moved to New Hampshire. We had lots of them in our garden there and they just seemed so unusual to me with their raised cone center and the petals hanging down below. Their botanical name is Echinacea - which comes from the Greek "echinos", meaning hedgehog! And they are prickly too! I have lots of hedgehog stories - but another day for those...

Anyhow, the first time I tried carving in metal clay, I was doodling and trying to decide what to carve that wasn't too difficult...had a little bit of a cut-out in it that I could patina to stand out...was easily recognisable...
Well I was still making quite a lot of silver flowers at that time and so the profile of a coneflower came to me.

The shape of the piece then just seemed to follow the flower shape and having a textured background where the cutout would show through just seemed to all come together.

I keep seeing lots of flowers lately - not just seeing them, but taking note of them, so I feel I'm up for a resurgence of flower jewelry...but maybe as the summer is ending, I'm too late??? Never too late for flowers. Maybe some new ones will appear soon...