Category Archives: sterling silver

ID bracelet gets a refit

I had a stunningly good day’s hunting in the local charity shops the other day. One of the items I bought was this silver bead thingy, set with a tiny opal. I wanted to create a piece of jewellery out of it and settled on making it into a bracelet.

None of the spare bits of silver chain I had were any good – they were either too flimsy, too short or simply the wrong kind of chain.

Then I remembered I had this silver ID bracelet:

One end of the central panel was starting to detach from the chain and the panel itself was (a) scratched and (b) had a faint, illegible engraving on it, so the bracelet was no good from a reselling point of view. I clipped out the panel and replaced it with my bead, using pairs of jump rings of 2.5 mm diameter and 0.8 mm thickness. It was an extremely fiddly job, but I’m quite pleased with the result:

It can be worn on its own or stacked with other thin bracelets/bangles. Not bad for £1!

Pink perfection – Lola Rose bracelet, Buch and Deichmann bangles, & N.E. From silver ring

I bought the Lola Rose bracelet first, several years ago. It was part of a bundle of Lola Rose stuff that I found in a local charity shop. Since then I’ve sold most of the other items on but I kept this rose quartz heart bracelet, because I love rose quartz. Then a few months back I came across two pink Buch and Deichmann bangles. B+D is a Danish company that now makes eyewear, but back in the ’70s and ’80s they sold a range of attractive jewellery and hair accessories. Designed by Ketty Dalsgaard, these were made of nylon in a range of gorgeous colours, and were lightweight and tactile. The colour of the bangles is the perfect match for the bracelet, and they all sit happily on the wrist without clanking or scratching each other.

To complete the pink ensemble shown in the pic, the silver and rose quartz ring is by another Danish designer, Niels Erik From. I bought this in another local charity shop for £1. Yes, £1. You don’t get bargains like that very often.

Silver mask pendant converted from a brooch

Continuing the theme of jewellery conversions, I’ve just made this sterling silver mask pendant:

… out of a brooch that had once been part of an auction lot. The brooch was unwearable because the rollover clasp had lost its rollover part. This wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem, but the pin was also very loose in its moorings – hence the brooch would fall off almost as soon as you put it on. Below is a picture of the pendant from the back, when it was in fact a brooch:

I knew I had to remove the pin and somehow break off the clasp and mooring. I was able to clip them off using a pair of pliers, but this left a couple of jagged stumps which would have been uncomfortable (and unsafe) to wear next to the skin, and the file I normally use for silver testing wasn’t really up to the job. Imagine my joy when last week I found a metal file for 20p in a charity shop. This file (see bottom picture) did a great job of sanding down the stumps, although it did take about half an hour of continuous work to do it. Anyway, I’m sure the file will play a key role in future jewellery mini-projects like this one.

Silver cat pendant made from a brooch

I recently bought a lot of jewellery at auction, which included this sweet little cat brooch:

Sadly, the clasp wasn’t up to the job, and sheared off when I tried gently pulling it into shape. So I filed down the stump where the clasp had been, removed the pin and curled the hinge over so that it could act as a loop for a chain. The resulting pendant is now on sale in my Etsy shop, chain included:

This is my first excursion into selling handmade stuff on Etsy. We’ll see how it goes.

Oops. What to do with broken amber earring?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – I’ve been busy and my Etsy shop has been doing better than it’s ever done before, so all my efforts have been concentrated there. Now it’s February, and sales have gone down. They always do go down in February. My theory is that the buying public is still spending money in January, because they have an Etsy gift card, or a cash gift from Aunt Jane to use up. Come February, the gift cards are just a memory and people realise that yes, they really do owe that much on their credit card and any discretionary spending is going to have to wait till payday.

This month I had a rare trip to Canterbury to browse the local charity shops. I like going to Canterbury, but its charity shops – while great to browse around – don’t tend to yield that much in the way of affordable shop items. I was however delighted to find these Celtic beauties, made from sterling silver and amber:

On getting them home, I noticed that the clip was misaligned on one of the earrings, so I tried gently bending it to get it in place. Sadly, it snapped right off, leaving a stump. Oops.

I will have to think about what I want to do with the broken earring, because it’s too nice to scrap.

Repair job: silver bracelet with hollow dangle charm

I paid £5 for this lovely hallmarked silver thing in a local charity shop the other day:

It almost certainly started life as a bracelet, but the fastener was absent. So I dug around in my box of bits, and found a toggle clasp. This clasp originally came off a Dower and Hall necklace that fell apart as soon as I got it home from the charity shop. It’s also hallmarked and has a nice, organic shape (rosebud finials!) that goes well with the bracelet. I used a couple of sturdy jump rings to attach the toggle, and now I’ve got a functional bracelet:

I’m still a bit puzzled by the bracelet’s age. The overall design and the style of the hallmark makes me think Victorian/Edwardian, but I can’t read the date letter – looks like a very worn “p” or maybe a Q. The rest of the hallmark is lion passant, leopard’s head (London) and maker’s initials GLC or GLG. Any suggestions as to who this is and when they were plying their craft are most welcome.

Blue John pendant… reborn as a necklace

I bought a small auction lot of pendants recently. One of the pendants consisted of a Blue John stone set in a silver mount. (Blue John is a distinctive purple fluorite stone found in a certain part of Derbyshire, and jewellery made with it is quite sought after.) It was only when I looked closely that I realised the bale was actually broken – someone had crushed it and the top had split. You can just about see this in the photo:

I thought it would be a shame to consign this sweet little pendant to the scrap heap. What’s more, I would like to eventually make a profit out of the items in the lot, so I converted the pendant into a necklace. I cut the bale off, used a file to smooth the place where it had been removed, and then attached some silver chain. And here is the result:

Have now listed it in my Etsy shop. Hopefully soon someone will find that they can’t live without it.

Adventures in silver testing part 3: the clear-out

Yesterday I had a huge sort-out of jewellery items that I’d acquired over the last few years – mostly in charity shops, but some on eBay – the low-priced items with blurry photos, listed late at night or early in the morning, which I considered were worth a gamble in the hope that they might be made of silver. Some of them actually were made of silver, but some of them failed the test that I subjected them to last night.

So all of this little lot (see below) has gone to one of my local charity shops. There are some perfectly nice pieces of jewellery in there, and also some silver-plated spoons. It leaves me with a (slightly) tidier work room and I’ve also come up with better system for sorting stuff out before selling. There’s now a clear plastic bag labelled “To be tested”, another bag labelled “To be repaired”, and another one labelled “Ready to be listed”. So now I can do a batch testing session, having donned the latex gloves that are next on my shopping list (‘cos silver testing solution is very allergenic and shouldn’t be allowed to come in contact with your skin).

Sterling crescent dangle brooch – not vintage enough for Etsy?

Last Saturday I went to Canterbury for a bit of retail therapy. Of course, I just had to do the rounds of the charity shops, one of which produced this lovely brooch:

I saw that it was stamped with “925” on the back, and when I got it home I realised that it actually had a full British hallmark. However, the hallmark is very blurred – it’s basically two illegible blobs, followed by a lower case letter “e”. For all British assay offices, this corresponds to the year 2004.

If I wanted to sell this beauty on Etsy I wouldn’t be able to do so for another six years, because according to Etsy’s rules an item needs to be at least 20 years old before it can be classed as vintage. Ah well, it might have to join my own collection for a while then. It’s a hard life.

Repurposed pendant made from a Victorian brooch



I bought a job lot of silver bits a while back, one of which was a Victorian brooch with some lovely engraving featuring cannabis-like leaves and a little bird. Unfortunately the pin had come off, leaving the C-clasp behind, plus a rough blob of solder where the pin had joined onto the back. I used a pair of pliers to curl the C-clasp and form a closed loop, and then bent the loop back so that it was near-parallel to the surface of the brooch. Then I added a jump ring. I used the file that had come with my new silver testing kit to smooth off the solder. So here is the result, front and back:

The back looks less than ideal but at least it’s reasonably smooth – and I made a pendant from something that would have ended up lying in a drawer or being sold for scrap.