Felicity the Cricket Amongst the Forget-Me-Nots Necklace

It is the sound of summer itself. Not a single cricket but the whole chorus of them, rising and falling in the warm dark, so familiar that you stop hearing it as sound and start hearing it as the feeling of a perfect August night. And then one lands near you and you actually look at it, really look, and you realize you have been listening to music made by wings your entire life without ever stopping to think about how extraordinary that is.

The Cricket

Crickets do not sing with their mouths. They sing with their wings. The left forewing carries a thick ribbed structure with up to 300 tiny teeth arranged like the teeth of a comb, and when the cricket raises that wing to a precise 45 degree angle and draws it across a scraper on the right forewing, the result is that sound, that particular warm rhythmic chirp that has been filling summer nights for roughly 200 million years. The process is called stridulation and every cricket species has its own completely unique song, as individual as a fingerprint.

Male crickets have not one song but several. A loud calling song that carries long distances to attract females and warn away rival males. A quieter courting song sung only when a female is close, intimate and entirely different in character from the public one. And a triumphal song sung after mating, which is exactly as pleased with itself as it sounds. Females can sing too, though they rarely do. You can tell a female cricket from a male by her ovipositor, the long needlelike egg laying organ extending from the tip of her abdomen. This cricket is a lady. If you look closely enough you will find it.

Crickets have been considered lucky in nearly every culture that has ever lived alongside them. In China they were kept in ornate cages as living good luck charms, their songs compared to beautiful music. In Ireland they were called Old Folks and believed to be hundreds of years old, ancient creatures who knew all the history of the houses they inhabited and kept the fairies away at night so everyone could sleep safely. Charles Dickens wrote an entire novella about the luck a cricket brings to a household, published in 1846, called The Cricket on the Hearth. In many traditions killing a cricket deliberately was considered a serious invitation to bad luck, which tells you something about how deeply people valued their presence.

Felicity is carrying all of that with her wherever she goes.

The Piece

Her name is Felicity, from the Latin meaning happiness and good fortune, because she is a cricket and that is simply what crickets bring and she has always known it.

She sits among a spray of forget-me-nots on a large oval sterling silver pendant, her body shaped in the torch flame and given her final details with miniature carving tools after cooling, every leg and antenna and wing rendered with the kind of care that rewards a very close look. If you look closely enough you will find her ovipositor. Felicity is the only cricket that will ever look exactly like her.

The forget-me-nots surrounding her were built petal by petal by hand, each tiny five petaled flower cut individually and pieced together and soldered with painstaking care into a bouquet that spreads across the face of the pendant. Three Kingman turquoise cabochons, US mined and cut, are set among the flowers, their soft blue the exact color of those beloved tiny blooms. Kingman turquoise is mined in Arizona and carries that particular quality of blue that sits somewhere between sky and water depending on the light.

The pendant itself measures approximately 3 inches long and hangs on a handmade sterling silver chain of 19.5 inches that was crafted specifically for Felicity, its swirls and loops giving it a delicate and considered quality that a standard chain simply could not. Max the cat, maker's mark of The Striped Cat Metalworks, lives on the back.

The Craftsmanship

• Pendant: approximately 3 inches long
• Stones: three Kingman turquoise cabochons, US mined and cut
• Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
• Chain: 19.5 inch handmade sterling silver loop and swirl chain
• Detail: Max the cat maker's mark on reverse
• Edition: one of a kind

One of a Kind

There is only one Felicity. This cricket, these forget-me-nots, this handmade chain built specifically for her: they exist once. When she finds her person she will never be made again exactly like this.

A Note from Tamara

I have always loved crickets for the same reason I think most people secretly do, which is that their sound is the sound of summer being exactly what summer should be. I made this particular cricket as a lady because I wanted to celebrate the female of the species who is so often overlooked in favor of the singing males, and because her ovipositor makes her unmistakably herself in a way I find deeply satisfying. I named her Felicity because happiness and good fortune are exactly what crickets have always brought to the people lucky enough to have one nearby. I paired her with forget-me-nots because the name felt right for a lucky creature you are meant to carry with you and remember. I hope whoever wears her hears crickets differently after that, as the extraordinary wing music it actually is.

Shipping

Your Felicity is finished, packaged safely, and will be on her way to you within 3 to 5 business days.