N°124 Christmas 2025 Special Earrings

Beauty with a sting

Thistles get a bad rap — prickly, stubborn, the sort of plant that doesn’t care what you think.
But walk the South Coast of New South Wales this spring, and you’ll see what I saw: hillsides buzzing with bees attracted to violet spikes that look almost electric in the sunlight. That was the spark for these 7.8 cm earrings — an ode to the humble thistle and to my great-grandmother Josefina, who revered them like saints.

She brewed them into tinctures for toothaches, stomach aches, and heartbreaks — an old Serbian herbalist who didn’t meet a doctor until she turned ninety-three. I think she’d like these: unikite stones for earthy resilience, peridot for vitality, and carnelian for that warm pulse of life.

Because thistles, like women who know their power, protect what matters — healing the world in small, quietly defiant ways.