Monthly Archives: August 2017

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).