OLIVE My Earring Club Members!

It's the end of the month...which means that my next month's creations for the earrings-of-the-month club gals goes in the mail today.

Having won a recipe contest through We Olive, I roped some friends into joining me and my family at the Paso Robles Olive Festival, an all-day celebration of all things olives. We sipped olive oils, bent olive branches into crowns, spooned olive jam onto olive oil crisps, slathered olive oil lotion onto sun-baked skin, and cooled off with olive oil ice cream – topped with balsamic vinegar. What we didn’t do, that I thought we would: taste olives. You know, the actual fruit. I envisioned tubs of green, almond-shaped cerignola; slightly wrinkled, almost midnight gaeta olives; and the green picholine to the purplish liguria all swimming in their pools of delicious brine.

So, while dreaming of olives, I decided to make that the theme for this month’s Earrings-of-the-Month selection: Olives!

The earrings are made with eco-friendly olive-shaped acai seeds handwired with sterling silver, lava beads, and hematite. Here’s what my vendor writes about their acai beads: “Our beads are made in our small workshop in South America. The workshop is clean and workers receive a fair wage so everybody's happy! Plus collecting and selling seeds creates income for the indigenous people. Without this income, the rainforest is often destroyed to provide for a more agrarian society.”