'Show her your love is as bag as the whole solar system' sounds like a schlocky sales pitch, right?  Well, it is but the Laura Cesari, a.k.a. Chain of Being, Solar System Necklace is just too awesome not to be schlocky about.

Now, there is a big Scienceblogs.com kerfuffle about them turning over the site to profit- and non-profit institutions for money so before anyone thinks the same thing is happening here, I will say right up front I am not getting any money to promote this thing.    It is just cool. 

It is essentially a beaded model of our solar system and each bead is, as she says, completely to scale. 

Years ago, I discovered a particularly nice piece of agate in a friend's bead shop that reminded me of Jupiter, and created a "Jupiter necklace" with other beads orbiting around it like moons. In the Solar System design, I decided to "zoom out" and focus on using small beads to measure the proportional distances between the planets. It took some calculations, a few abstractions, and a couple of prototypes: the first version was 75 inches long, made with 7-millimeter tubular glass bugle beads, each bead representing about 20 million miles. This Solar System Necklace design seemed like a good way to translate the mind-boggling distances of space into something tangible, something that people can measure physically with familiar objects.

Solar system necklace.  Photo: makersmarket

Cost for this 75 inch version is $75.  A dollar an inch.  Not bad.

Or, if you are more Earth-Centric, this one might be better:


Photo: makersmarket

The Earth orbit above is 30 inches and has turquoise, opalescent glass and black glass.  Each black glass bead represents approximately 1 million miles of distance that our Earth will travel to complete its orbit.  Cost: Just $24.   

Is my wife getting one?  Only if she doesn't read this blog.