RALEIGH, North Carolina — Sometimes inspiration flies
up and smacks you in the face. That’s what happened to jewelry maker Susan Reynolds.
“One day I was walking my dog and this cicada flew around
and hit me in the head, then it fell to my feet,” Reynolds said.
اضافة اعلان
Once they emerge, cicadas have only a few weeks to live.
This particular one seemed to have died in flight. Reynolds picked up the
insect, took it back to her work table and became fascinated by the shape and
intricate veining of its wings.
That is how she created her first pair of earrings from
cicada wings almost 20 years ago, long before Brood X emerged in so many parts
of the United States this spring. Now, Reynolds is filling orders for
significantly more customers, who want to commemorate the 17-year cicada, she
said.
At first, she kept her
cicada earrings simple: just the
wing, coated in resin. Then she started adding semiprecious stones and
Swarovski crystals. This year, Reynolds, 62, incorporated flowers, leaves and
birds cut from vintage postcards into her designs. The results look almost like
tiny, delicate, panels of stained glass.
“I want to make jewelry that looks like a fairy flew into an
elderly woman’s room and started snatching things off her dressing table,”
Reynolds said.
Getting the raw material takes a bit of work. Brood X has
been prevalent in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, but North Carolina
does not get large numbers of them.
The Raleigh area does get other cicadas, usually in early
July, but until they appear, Reynolds has relied on packages of dead cicadas
from Brood X hot spots. Most of Reynolds’ neighbors also know that she’s the
cicada lady — she put out the word on the neighborhood listserv — so people
drop dead cicadas in a box by her front door, too.
Initially, Reynolds said, she thought: “Who would want to
mail me dead bugs? Would the Postal Service even allow that?”
It turns out her customers supply them. Cheryl Fraser, the
owner of Galatea Boutique, a local store that sells the jewelry, said that
people have started dropping dead cicadas off at the store. (One customer sent
earrings to a daughter in Washington, DC, to commemorate the cicadas’ invasion
of the nation’s capital.)
“They’re really taking off,” said Fraser, who has sold
Reynolds’ jewelry for more than a decade. “It’s a tip of your hat to the
cicada.”
Until she is ready to work on them, Reynolds puts the dead
insects in bags and freezes them. Even frozen, cicadas are very stinky. When
she gets ready to remove a batch of wings, she puts on a mask, lights a scented
candle, and uses microsurgical scissors to snip the wings from the bodies.
The wings generally do not need cleaning, but if something
is stuck to them, she dips them in warm, soapy water. Despite their ethereal
appearance, the wings are pretty tough.
She disposes of the rest of the bug. “The birds and
squirrels like to eat them, believe it or not,” Reynolds said.
The rest of the process involves selecting the right designs
from her collection of vintage postcards, and layers of resin. It takes
Reynolds five to six days to complete a pair of earrings or a necklace.
It can make for a bit of a entomological scene: Last summer,
Reynolds counted 480 cicadas in her freezer by the end of the season. (Allowing
for occasional damaged wings and single wings for pendants, 480 cicadas equals
800 pairs of earrings, give or take.) They are now sold at 10 galleries and
museum stores in the region; prices range from $50 to $85 for earrings and $54
to $125 for necklaces.
At the height of the pandemic, people bought through her
Etsy store, Bijou Savvy. “I really had no idea they’d get so popular,” Reynolds
said, laughing.
The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown
Raleigh has sold the earrings at its museum shop for a number of years,
according to Heather Heath, the retail operations manager for the museum.
Insects are a big deal at the museum: Its annual weeklong
Bugfest drew around 35,000 people, pre-pandemic, to learn about (and eat) them.
But Heath said that Reynolds’ jewelry is different because it shows that
cicadas are “beautiful” and not just noisy, messy sex machines.
“I really like it when people take something that many
people think is gross and icky, and see that it can be beautiful,” Heath said.
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