The Picual Olive Collection

The Picual olives get their name from the Spanish root 'pico' meaning 'peak' which refers to their unique slightly pointed tips, much like a tear drop. 

The Olive Leaf Collection was born on a glorious sunny afternoon supping wine and dancing barefoot to live music among the olive trees at Rangihoua Olive Estate on Waiheke Island wth family and friends. 

The next morning I found I had pockets full of olive leaves that my two young daughters had collected and stashed to create collages with.  I loved the pointy ends and their sturdy structure.  We decided to make some leaf jewellery and curled the leaves into different designs, or glued them together to form brooches and rings. 

The girls' pieces were so lovely that I wondered if I could translate that same organic beauty into silver and gold.

So began a process of trial and error to cast the leaves into metal without burning holes in them and capturing the detail of the leaf's delicate structure yet also making something bright and shiny.

The end result are several leaves of different shapes and sizes which are textured on the inside to show the grain and polished to a high shine on the reverse.  These leaves have been manipulated into different shapes and some soldered to others to create the beautiful eye-catching pieces which make up this collection.