My friend Sylvia is a painter, and she has a very particular and cultivated sense of color. (Below is a large painting of hers that hangs across from my bed.) She is thin and careful and quiet; in the animal kingdom she would be a praying mantis.

For Sylvia’s birthday gift, I made my first jewelry piece from the glass “candies” I cut and fired in Paris last week. I chose two small ones for an asymmetric pair of earrings, attaching star-shaped flat metal “discs” to the back of the glass, then connecting those to sterling silver earring wires. The stars stuck out a tiny bit from the back so I had to clip two of the points. An imperfect, punk-rock solution; thankfully Sylvia appreciates such things.

The palette for these first glass pieces (image in the post below) is drawn from the colors you see in old Paris cafes. They are all over France, in fact, but in particular there is the frozen-in-time Le Rouquet, down the street from the better known Cafe de Flore on the Boulevard St. Germain.

I hope to post a pic of Sylvia in the earrings soon. Her short, dark hair—an ever-changing sculpture—makes a good frame for earrings, which she almost always wears.