There are a number of traditional signs of spring – crocuses, robins, etc. Since we’ve lived in Maine, one of my personal signs of spring is the appearance of fiddleheads. These are the tightly coiled baby ferns coming up through last year’s blanket of left over leaves. In our old house we had lots of woods surrounding the house and most years we had lovely swathes of ferns spring up in the dappled sun under the barely budding trees.
Now that we’ve moved to a house in town I thought we’d left behind this fascinating miracle of spring. I was so excited to discover these tiny fiddleheads just barely peeking out of the dirt at the edge of the trees. Those tall green leaves are some sort of bulb, maybe daffodils?? Usually the fiddleheads are green but I’ve seen them in a coppery color occasionally too. In the above picture you can see the combination of light green stem and light brown tiny feathery parts that will open up into green fronds.
I chose to incorporate a background of a fully opened fern frond which I made by drawing with colored pencils on shrink plastic. I then formed the copper wire into various sizes of fiddlehead shapes and glued them to the baked shrink plastic rectangle, finishing with a small loop of leather for a bail. I like the combination of copper and green with the dark background. I wish I could have taken a clear picture with the sun shining through the pendant to show the full effect but my photography skills were not up to the task. So I’ve photographed it on an envelope for scale.
edited: I did it. Here it is in the sunny window!
