This week the spotlight is on the AFRICAN SAFARI BANANA TREE multi row necklace. I came up with the AFRICAN SAFARI collection back in 2008. Yes, it has been a long time, and yes, the collection is still available due to circumstances I won’t go into, but I will go into the story behind the piece.

AFRICAN SAFARI came about because I had plenty of animal charms. I also bought a lot of pendants and divided them into silver and gold. Then I thought about the colours that would go with those pendants and charms. The wild deserts of Africa needed lots of golds for daytime and silvers for night time. Black and white added to not only zebras but the black of the sky and the white of the stars.

Rich browns, yellows and oranges added to the warm richness of the African heat, as well as eagles, monkeys, giraffes, snakes and zebras. I chose semi precious stones such as Snowflake Obsidian, Onyx, Goldstone and Amber. I chose rich pearl or stone look resin beads in banana, browns and blacks plus Cat’s Eye and glass beads. I added magic beads and silver and gold filigrees.

For the BANANA TREE necklace I used pearl resin beads in brown and banana, black onyx twists and ovals, gold filigrese, magic beads and Swarovski crystals. The giraffe is a brass pendant, the chain is costume.

The collection came together over two or three weeks of long hours and longer nights. The problem was, it was October 2008 and I’d just had nose surgery so was sitting there at the table in the dining room with a cotton wool bollard stuck up under my nose because I couldn’t blow it for a week and had to let it drip, gross, I know. So the weeks wore on and the collection grew to somewhere over 130 pieces. The names came about years later when I read an article about naming your products and it was fairly easy to name them all as each mini collection within the collection had a name. When I started selling on Madeit I also decided to put all the hair accessories together into hair kits, another idea I came up with.

The AFRICAN SAFARI collection is a rich luscious bed of African desert colours and wild animals. Each piece is a one off that you will never see or buy again so you’re guaranteed a piece of fabulous jewellery no one else has, and each piece is handmade in Australia with love and care.