Here’s the first customer review of the Solar System Necklace Kit on Makers Market:

“I’m eleven (11) yrs. old, & dad bought this for mom. I assembled it by myself with help from dad on making the clasp and getting the right number of black beads. (Dad wanted to help so I let him count beads for me 😉 I found this fun and not too difficult. It looks really good on mom, you have to double loop it so it’s not too long though. “

Solar System Necklace Kits have now shipped to various locations around the globe: It’s delightfully mind-boggling to think about how each kit represents an individual person’s experience of visualizing the Universe!

The Solar System Necklaces have had a very exciting couple of days!

I was very excited to discover the recent Planetary Society interview about the Solar System Necklace Series referenced on the MAKE:zine and Makers Market blogs, which bounced through TrendHunter, Neatorama, Woman’s Day, and The Daily What.

Make: Solar System Necklace – Each Bead Represents 20 Million Miles
Makers Market blog: Chain of Being featured by Planetary Society
TrendHunter: Cosmic Jewelry puts the Milky Way Galaxy on your Neck
Neatorama: Solar System Necklace
The Daily What: Nerdy Necklace of the Day
A Mirror and a Steady Hand
The Photo Stream
Woman’s Day

The post from MAKE:zine also revealed a brief mention from Dr. Raven Hanna of Made with Molecules, who makes wonderful silver molecule themed necklaces based on the shapes of molecular structures:
The Road from Maker Faire: Raven Hanna

In the discussions following the articles, readers have shared other jewelry projects they have seen that incorporate planets, stars, and other space-related themes. I haven’t seen any other designs that measure astronomical distances, but nonetheless, it was fun to see all the different creative interpretations of this classic, universal theme:

Fire Mountain Gems’ “Solar System Necklace”
Delight’s Earthly Delights “Solar Delights #1”
WonderWonder’s Solar System Necklace in Pomegranate (pictured below)
The Inspired Orb’s “Solar System Necklace”
Artsy Fartsy Lisa’s “Galaxy Necklace”
Rutigliano’s “Galaxy Necklace”
Free Time Watch referencing planetary orbits

There are even a few kids’ activities in a similar vein. A couple of them use proportional data, though with a cruder degree of accuracy:

The Solar System in Cheerios! (looks somewhat proportional, not sure of the unit)
Challenger Center for Space Science Education: Solar System Bead Distance Activity (this one is vaguely proportional: it suggests using centimeters to represent AU’s)
Museum Astronomical Resource Society: “How to Make a Solar System Necklace” (not proportional but cool anyway!)

Have you seen any others?
If your universe were a necklace, what would it look like?

WonderWonder’s Solar System in Pomegranate

I am amazingly wonderfully honored to be interviewed by The Planetary Society about the Astronomy Beadwork project and Solar System Necklace series. In fact, “amazingly wonderfully honored” seems like sort of a silly understatement… I mean… wow!   Being featured next to articles about solar-sail spacecrafts and journeys through the Asteroid Belt is almost as humbling of an experience as looking up into the fantastic, unfathomable Vastness of Space itself!

The Planetary Society’s Emily Stewart Lakdawalla asks some very thoughtful questions about jewelry, astronomical data, and getting both sides of the brain to work together.

Check out the article here:
The Solar System, in Jewelry Form

In addition to being a journalist for the Planetary Society, Lakdawalla also makes Space-themed artwork: I’m a big fan of her Hayabusa Spacecraft Amigurumi and Moons of Saturn Quilt.

The Planetary Society was started by Carl Sagan & cohorts, and is now directed by Bill Nye: they build amazing stuff and explore the unknowns of our neighbors out in the black….

Yeah, wow again…