Ta da and the mystery item is revealed…. drum roll …… a copper plated hop.
My friend Frances Geesin is a textile artist. While I simply cut up fabric, rearrange the bits then sew them back together again, Frances does extraordinary things both to and with her fabrics. What she does transcends my approach, the result always has the WOW factor and truly can be called ‘art’. Her other love is using what is to hand and electro-plating all kinds of natural items to wonderful effect.
On that theme, as a complete surprise, out of the blue she produced the hop I shared a tiny part of in a post earlier this month.
It was a first trial electro-plating she had done of a hop. Although it was hardly a fair trial run, it was a last season hop that had been hanging up for almost a year, so rather jaded and extremely fragile even at the lightest of touches. But I was impressed by how good this was even after this rather tough trial run.
Sooo excitingly with a 2015 Fuggle hop fresh footed and hot off the hop bine this was the next result.
Just beautiful. An object to hold and admire, ( if you love hops of course! ) the copper sheen alters throughout. Sadly by then the few Fuggles hops I have, had been picked and popped into an early green home brew! It will be a very frustrating 12 months to wait now, a whole year before next years crop.
In the meantime I selected a few of the smaller fresh Cascade hops, they have a denser and more spiky cone than the classic larger Fuggle hop cones, but being smaller I was thinking mmm maybe they might make some earrings?! Having said these were smaller, interestingly a lot of the hops in the country were smaller than normal this year.
size comparison of Fuggle hop with Cascade hop & 2 pence piece
If anyone else is interested in copper or silver electro-plated hops Frances has a little stash. For enquiries you can contact her via her website. Or just check out her website gallery to have a look at her stunning plated Ginkgo leaves, sycamore seeds and other amazing work.
