Luxury Webblog Spot

Caddisflies and jewelry? Few people would make the tiffany jewelry connection.

Kathy Stout did just that as she watched the larvae of caddisflies painstakingly build protective casings out of small stones.

“I thought they were incredible insects,” she said. “I thought, `Wow, they’re so beautiful.’”

Ms. Stout was introduced to the caddisfly by her former husband, Ben Stout, a biologist. As he studied the tiny fresh-water insect, her fascination with its masonry grew. Ms. Stout thought it would be interesting to see what the larvae would do with precious and semi-precious stones. She watched in awe as they created beautiful artwork that they discarded as they entered the adult stage of life.

Ms. Stout realized the casings were perfect natural ingredients for creating jewelry.

“I can’t leave the house without a piece of my jewelry on,” Ms. Stout remarked. “I have silver necklaces literally sold jewelry right off my body.”

Ms. Stout is just as committed to telling the story of the amazing caddisfly as she is to the jewelry she makes with their help. The presence of caddisflies in a river or stream is a sign of clean water.

Ms. Stout will be at Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester on Thursday evening to talk about her favorite insect – “I want them to be as famous as the dragonfly,” she said – and demonstrate how she uses the exquisite casings to make earrings, necklaces and bracelets.

“I’m going to bring some bugs with me,” she said by telephone from her home in Wheeling, W.Va. “I’ll bring jewelry and casings and material to construct jewelry.”

In order to make her jewelry, Ms. Stout needs to be rather closely involved in the later stages of tiffany bangles the caddisfly life cycle. Each March, she gathers a few friends and they trek up to the headwaters of springs in the mountains of West Virginia, where the larvae congregate and live off debris. “They maintain the water quality in the stream for other organisms,” Ms. Stout explained.

She and her friends collect the larvae that are in the stage in which they are starting to construct their protective casings; it’s an amazing process to observe, she said. The larvae start by gluing pieces of leaves together with silk.

“If it’s a nice, beautiful weekend, it’s wonderful,” Ms. Stout said. “You sit on the side of a stream and look at leaves. They cut these round-circle disks out of leaves to start constructing the casings. You find the leaf disks and know they’re there.”

Ms. Stout and her friends collect 2,000 to 3,000 caddisflies and bring them back to her house, where she has bins filled with water kept between 55 and 65 degrees. She must maintain a certain water flow and oxygenation or the caddisflies will perish. She feeds her insects leaf debris she has collected from the headwater streams. It took years to create her simulated environment, and she must continually fine-tune it.

As the larvae move into the stone-building stage, Ms. Stout provides them with gems from which to build their casings. Each September, the casings become cocoons. The caddisflies emerge and head for land. They shed one more layer of skin and fly off. Ms. Stout collects the hollow casings and, using a syringe filled with jeweler’s glue, she carefully seals each one.

Ms. Stout, 46, works as a respiratory therapist, and her mother designs and makes much of the jewelry. It is tiffany rings sold on Ms. Stout’s Web site, www.wildscape.com. As far as she knows, she is the only person making jewelry out of caddisfly casings. She knows of an artist in France who uses the casings to create pieces of art.

As much as Ms. Stout enjoys making her jewelry, her real dedication is to the welfare of the caddisfly. She visits schools to give talks and is working on an educational video on the caddisfly ecosystem.

“One way I can get younger kids involved in looking at streams is showing them the beauty and art associated with a stream,” she said.

Ms. Stout recently returned from Salt Lake City, where she attended the annual meeting of the North American Benthological Society, which is dedicated to the study of bottom-dwelling creatures in streams and lakes. When she’s away, her caddisflies are tended by her “bug sitter.”

“She knows the system really well and monitors the caddisflies for me,” Ms. Stout said. “They’re my babies. I want them to survive and live a happy life.”

Contact Pamela H. Sacks at Psacks@telegram.com

Jewelry Created by the Caddisfly

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, 414 Massasoit Road, Worcester

How much: $3 for members; $5 for nonmembers. There will be a charge for materials used, and Kathy Stout’s jewelry will be for sale.