BETHEL – Prior to Christmas, Bethel jeweler Jim Mann of Mt. Mann Jewelers created his own product line of ornament kits using sheets of mica.

That brainstorming session coupled with word that Bethel would attempt this winter to build the world’s tallest snow woman to top its 1999 world’s tallest snowman feat, spurred Mann into thinking big. Really big.

Using many, many sheets of muscovite mica from two Western Maine mines, Mann has committed himself and, as of Thursday, his son, to start building what he calls the world’s largest mica pendant.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Mann said of the estimated 6- to 7-foot-tall, hexagonal-patterned snowflake pendant. “I finished making my mica ornament kits and figured why not make a mica pendant for the snowwoman. It ought to be a hoot.”

It will also be an engineering challenge for the man who bought 600 to 700 pounds of mica back in the 1950s from the last mica cutting shop in Bethel. The flaky, reflective rock came from the Bumpus Mine in Albany Township and the Wheeler Mine in Gilead.

“Mica is pretty light, so I’m trying to find stainless steel staples. It will be an engineering feat to make it lightweight enough and with loops of steel on the back to attach it so the wind can’t blow it around,” Mann said.

He plans to start with plywood and create six pie-shaped wedges and unite them on angle iron, then weave 12 metal spokes out of the center and create a six-sided star in the middle of the pendant.

Each wedge will be layered with “books” of mica. The rock is called a book in geologic terms because an inch-thick piece of mica contains 1,000 pages, or sheets.

“The jewelry designer in me doesn’t mind doing something 7 feet square. It will be fun to make it structurally sound and not make it look like something that came out of an erector set, but I’ll probably drill until I never want to again,” Mann said.

When completed, he said the pendant might weigh 100 pounds or more.

“It will certainly be the largest mica pendant in the world, and it might also be the largest piece of jewelry ever made,” Mann added.