Time To Cut The Thread...

Meet Atropos, the oldest of the Fate sisters! Being the oldest, she was of course the inflexible one. And once you met the other two sisters, meeting her was inevitable. Guess what her job was? She was the sister responsible for both the mechanism and time of your death! I wonder what she did for fun? I wonder if she had a sense of humor? I wonder if she had a favorite pair of Fiskars that she just dared her sisters to touch?

My version of Atropos

I first covered her in obituaries from the local paper, and then I went in and highlighted words that I thought were important and symbolic, such as loved, wife, was, home, sister...

Her eyes are vintage train tokens that represent both the payment and passage of the soul through the underworld. Her mouth is stapled shut with waxed linen thread, a practice still in use in modern day mortuary science.  And since I am a jewelry artist, I had to make her a necklace out of vintage watch faces and ceramic skull beads, both of which symbolize the passage of time. Her hair is made from matches, representing the ritual of cremation and the moss around her neck represents burial in the ground. I decided to cover her in a glass cloche to symbolize our modern day mausoleum trend. 

Until next time...sharpen your scissors!

Rolled A Seven....

Are you a middle child? If so, are you flexible and diplomatic? Maybe the mediator between your siblings, as so many psychologists have reported you to be? Or are you an attention seeker and ultra competitive because your parents are too busy dealing with the other life sucking bookends in your overlooked existence? The middle child can run the gamut...a game of dice personified.

The three Fates in mythology were no different. In my last post I introduced you to the first sister, Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life. She was the over-responsible one. The controller. She managed to get your life going, being the high achiever that she was.  Now, meet the middle sister, Lachesis. She was the allotter of life, the determiner of your destiny, the assessor of your thread. Oh yes, she was THAT sister! She was always negotiating lives and tried to keep the peace between her other two sisters, a difficult task that even Zeus wanted no part of. Yeah, I'm betting she was often misunderstood and that she didn't get many dates at Mt. Olympus High either. Now, depending on what kind of day she was having when she measured your thread with her fatalistic tape measure, you may have a long, joyful life or a short, painful one.  I'm hoping when she measured mine her sisters were nowhere around and she was having a good hair day!

This is my version of Lachesis

The steampunk gears represent the constant motion of life, and the notion of one being a cog in the wheel of humanity. I took the literal representation of measuring life with the tape measure choker. Her ears...don't really need explanation...

Here's a tip for you-if you are going to use a gazillion screws for hair, paint them BEFORE you adhere them! 

Until Next Time...quam mensurae ad te? (How are you measuring up?)