Leather Petals

I’m a little obsessed with these little leather flower pins from the 1970s. It’s a passion fuelled in part by nostalgia — when I was a kid my parents would take us to Aberfoyle (a tiny town outside of Guelph, Ontario) where lots of hippies sold handcrafted jewelry like this.

They are also just plain pretty!

These brooches were also popular tourist pieces depicting the provincial flowers of Canada. I mostly come across trilliums (Ontario’s official flower). One caveat to this kind of collection is that leather dries out with age so many of the blooms that I find are cracked and in need of repair. I used to buy them and try and repair those wounded flowers but now I put them back.