This is a piece I carved just for fun. It started as a doodle in my sketchbook that I liked the look of; I thought the birds kind of had a Hieronymus Bosch thing going with their inflated bodies and teeny wings. I decided to carve it into a pendant for this big fat pear blue zircon. This was an especially fun piece to make. 18K.

I love when the backsides of pieces have a little extra something-something, and the shape of the bird bodies brought to mind eyes, so I made eyes happen.

Zircons are really awesome stones. They are particularly cool because the mineral has a high refraction and dispersion. This translates visually to mean that when faceted, light is bounced quite readily around and back out the front of the stone, AND when that happens, that light is broken into spectral colors so that the flashes you see are rainbowy. Not quite as high as a diamond (which is why people love diamonds: they are rainbow sparkle bombs), but pretty close. And when they are heated, they are incredible shades of sky-sea blue. (Unheated, they are usually amber to deep rusty read colors, and sometimes green.)

These eyes remind me of those martyred St. Lucy paintings showing her gouged-out eyes in various ways, on platters, growing on plants..