Dewdrop of Honey creates hand-painted jewelry from vegetable-tanned leather in Hanoi. We first fell in love with the pieces because of the colors, but looking at how they are made makes them even more interesting.
From a small piece of leather
The material is vegetable-tanned leather. In this traditional tanning process, plant-derived tannins are used to turn animal hide into leather. One characteristic particularly useful for this kind of work is that the resulting leather takes embossing very well.
Dewdrop of Honey starts by cutting the leather into small shapes. The surface is then moistened, formed and embossed by hand.
At this stage there is not much to see yet: a tiny piece of pale leather and a pattern pressed into its surface. The transformation happens with the paint.
Colors are applied by hand in several steps, following and emphasizing the embossed pattern. Flowers, leaves and geometric forms gradually appear where before there was only a small leather blank.
Small pieces, a surprising amount of work
This is one of the things I appreciate about handmade objects: the finished piece often gives very little indication of how many individual decisions and movements went into it.
A pair of earrings may be small, but somebody still had to cut it, shape it, emboss it, paint it, let it dry, finish the surface and assemble the metal parts. And because this is done by hand, even two earrings made from the same design are never completely identical.
The leather also keeps the earrings remarkably light. This allows Dewdrop of Honey to make fairly large and expressive pieces without turning them into weights hanging from your ears.
Dewdrop of Honey
What I like most about the work is that there is no need to invent a grand story around it. The process is visible in the objects themselves. There are traces of the tools in the embossed leather, small differences in the brushwork and variations between pieces that would disappear in industrial production.
Some designs are bold and colorful, others considerably more restrained. Materials such as stones or decorative metal elements sometimes find their way into the pieces as well.
Dewdrop of Honey is one of the artists whose work became part of Avanova because we genuinely liked what she was doing. That, ultimately, is the rather simple criterion behind our People & Craft section.
If you would like to know whether we currently have pieces available in Salzburg, just get in touch.