Jewelry

For those of you who know me, it is a known fact that I love jewelry! I don't love it because it is expensive, or glamorous. I do love that it sparkles though! I love Jewelry because it is intricate and complex. It takes great skill to cut stones to specific sizes and work metal into beautiful settings. The ring above is one I really want and cannot have because my Mother has it. There are so many stones fit together perfectly to give the appearance the ring has. It takes imagination to come up with a ring design like that! Pieces of jewelry really are works of art. It takes creativity, skill, trial, and the occasional error to come up with a finished piece of jewelry. I also like to think of Jewelry as having a story. Many of the pieces of jewelry I own (or my mother owns) are antiques. My father says they have someone’s tears all over them (this is just a little joke of his). A piece of jewelry can outlive any human especially if it is well made and taken care of. When I wear old pieces of jewelry I sometimes think of who the previous owner might have been. What must their life have been like, how did they receive the piece that I now wear? By thinking about this I think I can honor them and keep them alive, even though I never knew them. Like the great paintings you see in museums which have hung on numerous walls in various places, old jewelry has had a long and interesting life as well. For example I have a pair of antique French earrings dating to about 1900. I look at them and think of the things those earrings must have been through the emotions those who owned them had about them. Maybe they were given to a secret mistress as a present. Maybe they were purchased to match a gown that was going to be worn to a ball. Maybe someone simply liked them and bought them. But the earrings have changed hands over time who knows for what reasons, hatred, need, love, an heirloom. But when I wear those earrings I know they are more than something pretty to look at they are a story or their own, and my owning them just gives them more of a story.