Category Archives: charms

Flat pressed flower charm with sterling back

I found this charm for 50 p in a charity shop the other day. It’s made from real pressed flowers under a clear resin dome, and the backing is stamped with “silver”. It’s really pretty but probably not worth listing in my Etsy shop, because whatever I could realistically charge for it would be eaten up by Etsy’s fees pretty soon – gone are the days when Etsy was way cheaper than eBay.

So what to do with this sweet little vintage charm? For now, I’ve stashed it away with a collection of flat charms that I have – mostly spinners, coins and town crests. At some stage I will “build” a charm bracelet out of them: a charm made entirely with two-dimensional charms.

Mawi ring. With charm. Very large, dangly charm.

This is something I bought a while ago for £10 in a charity shop, thinking I would sell it on eBay and make a fortune. Well, a decent profit anyway. Sadly, the good people of eBay weren’t interested so I was stuck with it. This is the item in question:

As you can see, it’s a rather lovely cutwork silver ring, featuring a bird sitting on what looks like a vine laden with luscious, ripe grapes. Dangling from the bottom is a charm with wood and semi-precious beads, and a silver token. There is also a metal tag with “Mawi” stamped on it. I happen to know that Mawi is a high end costume jewellery brand that’s been sold in places like Liberty (I don’t know if they still are though – haven’t visited Liberty in ages). But this marriage of ring and charm is incongruous somehow, not to mention rather impractical. What’s more, I couldn’t find another version of this combo when I did a Google search on Mawi stuff, which generally veers more towards the statement-necklace-with-studs end of the spectrum.

What did I end up doing? Well, I took the charm off, threaded it onto a plain narrow silver band ring and put it on my handbag. I wear the ring often, because it’s just my style.

Adventures in silver testing part 4: the Victorian charms

Years ago, I bought these charms in a charity shop for £20.00. They must be at least 120 years old, and some of them are really quite beautiful. I particularly like the big pipe with a man’s head as the bowl – he looks like an Easter Island statue.

I wondered if the charms might be silver, but there’s something about the lustre and patina that isn’t quite right for silver. The other day, I got the ol’ testing kit out and was totally unsurprised to find that it came up negative. I think the they’re made from some kind of lead alloy. And as they’ve been stored in a box for a long time without seeing the light of day, I am selling them on Etsy.

Silver pound note charm – mad money!



So called “mad money” charms were a staple fixture on the charm bracelets of the mid-20th century. Some of them consisted of a precious metal (silver or gold) box with a glass/crystal window, some of them had a more cage-like structure, and some of them were like this lovely thing below, which is basically a Perspex cylinder finished off at each end with a silver finial.

I don’t know if anyone who wore a charm bracelet with a mad money charm on it ever took the pound note out and spent it. But back in the 60s or early 70s, a pound could go quite a long way – for example in 1970, a pint of beer cost about two shillings (10 pence after decimalisation). So your “mad money” pound note could have bought several drinks, plus food and a ride home.

poundnotecylinder