Cornish designer puts the art into Ford car parts

A Cornish designer has tackled one of the biggest and most unusual challenges of her career – creating a piece of jewellery out of Ford Focus car parts.
 
Twenty-six year-old Katherine Hawkins is a British designer who runs her ‘Crème Nouveau’ business from a studio in St Columb Major.  She was commissioned by Ford to create a unique piece of vintage-style ‘Ford’ jewellery as part of the company’s Centenary Tour – a month-long event celebrating 100 years of Ford of Britain.
 
The one-off necklace combines rhinestones and crystals with reversed instrument dials, needles, nuts, bolts and springs, on a template made from car seat material.
 
Katherine said: “When the box of car parts arrived, I didn’t really know what to expect.  It doesn’t help that I can’t actually drive so at first I didn’t know what the parts were for!  But once I got them spread out to see how they look and sit and how I could work with them, the idea came very quickly and I was able to use really cool metals, plastics and rubbery bits!”
 
The Ford Centenary Tour came to an end in September, covering a distance of over 2,200 miles across Britain, from Inverness to Southampton and Cardiff to London.