Wearing Your Earth Around Your Neck

While toy shops provided many materials for some of my previous accessories created employing toy cars, marbles and plastic figurines, hardware shops are definitely my favourite ones when it comes to finding interesting materials for new accessories. My Diabolik/La decima vittima necklaces were indeed developed after a few experiments I carried out in a hardware shops. 

Yet in the last few months I’ve been experimenting with medical suppliers as well. Such shops can indeed offer you some fascinating materials that can allow you to come up with interesting experiments or inspire some rather futuristic designs.  

For the time being I still haven’t used organ bags in Comrade Couture-style (though you never know what I may come up with in future…), so, don't worry, the following project isn’t going to involve anything extremely disturbing.

In fact in many ways this necklace moves from yesterday’s post about transnational identities and tribal attires and it’s inspired by the desire of preserving the Earth, but also of mixing and wearing your own culture with other cultures.

The style of this necklace is borrowed from the accessories worn by the Samburu women, so there is also something tribal behind this design.

Here’s the material you need for this necklace: two see-through plastic tubes of the kind used for aerosol therapy nebulizers (NB you can buy more than two, say four, if you want a richer necklace) sand or tiny rocks (always keep in mind the size of the nebulizer tubes); silicon and glue; aluminium foil or candy wrappers and a piece of leather string.

Tip: the necklaces can also be used as a souvenir of a place where you’ve been, so if you find yourself on holiday on a sandy or rocky beach, try to collect some material that you can use for this necklace (that's usually a cheap and fun way to make sure you get a unique souvenir from your holidays).

In my case I used sand collected from the Adriatic Coast and tiny stones, sulphur rocks and minerals from the beach around Ischia.

Fill each nebulizer tube with one material, for example one with sand, the other with rocks, making sure the materials are well distributed throughout the entire length of the tube and there is no air left in the tubes.

Try not to fill the tubes too much, then seal them with silicon (sand and tiny rocks can be insidious and easily escape from the tubes...) adding a little bit of aluminium foil or coloured pieces of candy wrappers to make sure the material won’t come out.

Wrap the leather strip around the edges of the necklace and glue them together to make sure they will stay in place.

You can repeat the process to make bracelets or opt for the latter if you don't have the patience you will need to make a necklace (filling long nebulizer tubes with sand or tiny rocks may be a long and tiring process).

Nebulizer tubes are usually very resistant, so these accessories won't break that easily (unless you pierce them with a thick needle or cut them with a knife) and, if you're really really good at sealing the tubes with silicon, you can also try filling them up with coloured liquids to create more interesting effects. 

Before wearing the necklaces, always remember to clean up the mess you made while working on this project, especially if you made a plastic and soil scarf to go with this necklace (fourth image in this post) and you're completely covered in soil, sand and rocks. 

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