There's an hour in early spring — maybe a week into cherry blossom season — when the light goes amber and the blossoms stop looking white and start looking like they're blushing. The branches hold them up against a sky that can't decide if it's lavender or gold, and for about twenty minutes the whole world looks like a Japanese woodblock print you'd swear someone invented. Nobody invented it. It just happens, every year, for anyone paying attention.That particular quality of light — warm, transient, saturated with color that shouldn't exist together but does — is what Illustrated Light and DC Designs have been chasing for years from their studio in Fort Collins, Colorado. Their method is giclée printing on layered stainless steel, the same fine-art reproduction process museums trust with their most color-sensitive work. It lets them build botanical compositions with a depth and luminosity that flat metal has no business achieving. The cherry blossom forms here seem to float against a moody, twilight-rich background, catching and releasing light the way petals do when they're backlit by a setting sun.Spring you can wear past April.Each earring is giclée-printed on stainless steel and hangs two inches from the top of the ear wire, with a weight of just three grams — light enough to forget you're wearing them, present enough that they move with you beautifully. The ear wires are hypoallergenic and nickel-free, so they're as kind to sensitive skin as they are to the eye.Handcrafted in Fort Collins, Colorado by Illustrated Light & DC Designs.
