The ashes of a baby who died in labour, the placenta from a powerful home birth, a lock of hair from a three year old girl who died in a car accident.
These items may seem unrelated, but they have all been turned into beautiful pieces of jewellery by Melanie Fogarty.
Melanie, 32, is the founder of Beyond The Willow Tree, creating beads, rings, necklaces, and more out of placenta, umbilical cords, breast milk, ashes, and hair.
The Queensland single mother-of-three, who lives in Cairns, had never experimented with jewellery before launching her own business in 2013.
Single mum-of-three Melanie Fogarty, 32, is the founder of Beyond The Willow Tree , creating beads, rings, necklaces, and more out of placenta, umbilical cords, breast milk, hair, and ashes
The Queensland mum, who lives in Cairns, had never experimented with jewellery before she launched her own business in 2013
Melanie found her calling shortly after she was inspired while giving birth to her third child.
‘My daughter was a home birth after two caesareans, and her birth was really empowering,’ Melanie told Daily Mail Australia.
Pictured is one of Melanie’s placenta rings
‘I wanted to capture that emotion somehow, and so I started looking into different ways that I could do that – and I had a crazy idea.’
‘I had kept hold of my daughter’s placenta and that was the only thing that tied me to the direct experience I had with her. So I thought, okay let’s do something with that.’
Melanie began to experiment with materials and started creating jewellery pieces out of her own placenta.
‘I had never in my life even experimented with anything like that, I had no clue what I was doing,’ Melanie said with a laugh.
‘I self-taught myself, I didn’t even use YouTube. I just picked up materials, worked out what would work and what wouldn’t, and just ran from there. There was lots of trial and error.’
But Melanie was inspired to create something special with her placenta after a powerful home birth with her daughter. Pictured here is blogger Vanessa Roy wearing her breast milk crystal
Melanie began to experiment with materials and started creating jewellery pieces. Pictured here is a woman wearing her breast milk lace on her wedding day
When she told her friends what she had done, they asked if Melanie could do something with breast milk as well. And so, Beyond The Willow Tree was born.
Melanie first started with placenta, which she found easy to work with it as it just needed to be dehydrated and ground down into a powder, which is then used in a stone.
A woman wears her breast milk bridal set, created by Melanie
But figuring out how to turn breast milk into a solid that would preserve forever turned out to be much trickier – and remains Melanie’s ‘million dollar secret’.
She even created breast milk designer lace, molding the milk into a lace design that is then placed into a bracelet.
Melanie slowly began to use other types of material as well, and the stories behind them became more emotional as she started to incorporate hair and ashes.
‘I started using ashes in 2014 when a woman I’d become friends with was due to give birth, and the baby passed away in labour,’ she said.
‘She was meant to be getting pieces made from placenta and breast milk, but when it passed away, that’s when I started looking into ashes.’
‘For the first few years I’d get really emotional every time I worked with those kinds of pieces. Sometimes people would send photos or a story and I’d have to put things away and come back to them because they were too much.’
Melanie slowly began to use other types of material as well, and the stories behind them became more emotional as she incorporated hair and ashes
Melanie still remembers the pregnant woman whose six-month-old baby died from SIDS. She wanted something of her first baby to hold onto when she went into labour with her second.
And Melanie ‘cried the whole time’ while working with a piece of hair from the little girl who was killed in a car accident.
But there have been happy memories as well, including engagement rings filled with breast milk and even a man’s wedding ring created with placenta.
‘I think for a mum who hasn’t experienced the loss of a child, this jewellery just ties you back to that experience,’ Melanie said.
‘It’s just like a song or a smell and it takes you right back there. It’s directly from something that your body and your baby went through together, in the formation of a keepsake. You can’t get anything more personal than that.’
The pieces range from $110 to $900 and Melanie, who has three children aged four to 13, handcrafts all of them herself. Pictured is Melanie’s breast milk lace creation
And as stressful and emotional as the business can be sometimes, Melanie loves helping create something for women that is so sacred and personal. Pictured is a breast milk crystal
Melanie, who is registered with the Australian government to import breast milk from around the world, has also been sent everything from dirt to animal fur.
‘We’ve had hair from pets that have passed away, cats, dogs, a horse, and I’m about to do a rat,’ she said.
Pictured is an umbilical cord ring created by Melanie for the company
‘We get requests to turn dirt into jewellery where they’re making a family home, and even menstrual blood – but I will not have a part of that.’
The pieces range from $110 to $900 and Melanie, who has three children aged four to 13, handcrafts all of them herself.
And as stressful and emotional as the business can be sometimes, Melanie loves helping create something for women that is so sacred and personal.
‘My most favourite part and the reason I do it is seeing women come back and saying, “Oh, this is amazing”‘, she said.
‘That feeling of being able to create something that means beyond anything else.’