Today's post was inspired by this post on Nancy's Fashion Style which I found through my friend Michelle's blog My Bijou Life (which you should check out if you are interested in fashion, but also jewelry making, quilting, and more).
As a jewelry artisan, I sometimes wonder where my jewelry ends up. Is it worn, is it loved, does it have a story - like being a gift or purchase for a special occasion - will it continue to have a story and create memories, will it be passed on to someone else, will it end up in a goodwill bin or at a fleamarket and will it find someone new there?
I will never know and maybe that's a good thing.
Where do those thoughts come from, though?
In my life I have collected quite a bit of jewelry myself. I can't remember which was my first piece of jewelry, but one of the earliest ones must have been a red coral necklace that I lost quickly if I remember right. After that came two silver pendants, a heart and a filigree flower with a pearl in the center (that I stubbornly declared to be an edelweiss). I wore the heart 24/7 for a long time until an incident caused my taking it off for good.
After that my memories get a little fuzzy until I was about 12.
For this post, I picked some of my earliest silver rings because I had remembered already having written about my most precious piece - emotional value, not monetary - but then I had the strange feeling that I had told the story of my first friendship ring before as well. Guess what, I have. And some other stories as well.
Here. Doh. I'm getting old (but at least remembered just in time).
But hey, maybe this just IS a topic for more than one post. If I only drop those memories on you every, now and then, it should be fine, shouldn't it?
And if it means that my jewelry box gets organized once again and I maybe learn something, that's a nice side effect, right?
I put my silver rings back and instead I grabbed a piece that I got around the same time and which I knew nothing about yet. Let's try to find something out together.
It's a bangle that I can't remember having worn even once.
In 1977, I was invited to spend part of the vacation in the Bavarian Forest with my friend's family. They always had rooms with the same family in a small village and also spent evenings with them, playing cards or talking. When we didn't go hiking or visit other tourist spots like glass shops in the area, the lady of the house sent us on little errands into the village to keep us entertained. She was a talented dressmaker and I remember the bolero and skirt she sewed for my friend as a gift.
She didn't make me feel left out, though. When our vacation was over, she came up to me and said she had a gift for me, too - this bangle.
While I appreciated the gift as such, I think I may have been too young to appreciate the modernist design. Also the bangle felt too heavy on my wrist, and soon it went into my first jewelry box from where it moved to the next to the next to the next ...
Every, now and then I looked at it, but always decided against wearing it because it just wasn't my style. It's quite amazing how much wear it got although it wasn't worn. Being pewter - which I'm not sure I even realized despite the marking - it also bent rather easily out of shape.
A soap bath and a bit of polishing didn't make much difference. I couldn't try the other tip I found online, to use warmed up beer, as beer is not my beverage of choice and there wasn't any.
Of course we didn't have internet back then and later I didn't even bother with a closer look at the markings ... which I did for this post, though.
There are two. One says "Dansk handarbejde" = "Danish handicraft", the other one "Løgeskov tin Danmark".
I couldn't find anything about the history of Løgeskov pewter in German or English and my Danish consists of the incredibly useful sentence "The room is big", but a list told me that Løgeskov Tin was not the only pewter jewelry manufacturer in Denmark.
What I also found were several pictures of pieces that would have gone well with my bangle, either because the design was almost or completely the same or because the same bright red glass cabochons (always my favorite part of the bangle) were used, or both. Rings, pendants, earrings, they had it all, and some pieces are even for sale on German eBay at this moment.
Moreover, I discovered that my bangle came with glass cabochons in different colors, yellow, light green, or blue, for example.
Well, I've learned something new and the bangle will go back into the chest for now, it probably has got used to it in the last 45 years ;-)
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