The pasta jeweller

As many of you will know who have visited Lawn Road, I collect earrings, many of which flaunt themselves on a couple of lampshades in the drawing room.

Knowing I collect them, friends seek out weird and wonderful creations to add to my collection in an attempt to upstage what I already have. So, when Alex (Gazzola – he of Allergy Insight) said that he had been looking for earrings for me on a  recent trip to Italy, my hopes were raised.

However, earrings were far from my mind yesterday when he arrived to discuss the 2020 FreeFrom Skincare Awards. He said he had brought me something from Italy and handed me this little Barilla box neatly tied up with string.

I presumed that he must have found some especially weird form of ‘freefrom’ pasta that he wanted me to try – although I could quite work out why he kept telling me it was ‘fragile’….. Until I actually opened the box – and there lay….

…a pair of  earrings made from dried farfalle or butterfly pasta shapes!

Apparently Alex had gone with his cousin Mario to the market in Parma in search of interesting ‘pasta’ type earrings but they had totally failed to find anything. However, Mario was having none of that and decided that if Alex could not buy me any, he would make me some.

To be fair, he does have some form as he used to work with stained glass – but decorative stained glass and earrings are a very different matter!! But there was no stopping him – and what an amazing job he did. For those interested in  the minutiae of such things, look a bit closer.

He took three different sized pieces of farfalle, painted the edges in the Italian colours and varnished them. Then he drilled a small hole in the ‘waist’ of each farfalle (how many did he break while doing that..) and threaded a thin gold chain through all three, ending it of with a little gold ‘stelline’ – a miniature pasta shape that is used in soup. Then he drilled more minute holes in the corners of each piece of pasta and threaded through tiny gold wires to attached the three farfalle to each other and to a small gold ring at the top. To this he attached the hook to go through the ear. And then finally he painted the ‘waist’ of each farfalle with a little dab of gold, just to ‘finish it off’! What a work of art….

And they are light and comfortable to wear – although I fear I am not doing them remotely justice as I do not have an Italian colour shirt  to complement them – an urgent purchase, obviously.

---

If you would like to get a notification whenever I post a blog, please ‘subscribe’ in the box on the right. It is very easy to ‘unsubscribe’ you if you get bored!

---