Monthly Archives: March 2018

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 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.

Broken amber earring is now… a bracelet

I debated whether or not to turn the broken amber and silver earring into a pendant, but couldn’t find a suitable jump ring (it needed a flattened, oval one rather than a round one IMO). So I hit on the idea of turning it into a bracelet. I had to break off the silver “pad” that would have been opposite the bit of the clip that clamps down on your earlobe. (This needed some care as silver is a soft metal and it was hard to make the pad shear off without distorting the rest of the earring. I just about managed it though.)

Then I filed down the two stumps where the pad had been and where the clip had broken off. I found a fine gauge silver charm bracelet, cut it in half, removed a few of the links on each of the two halves, and inserted the earring in the middle using a couple of small 0.8 mm gauge silver jump rings. Voilà!

Update: the 0.8 mm jump rings turned out to be too flimsy (nearly lost the bracelet while out shopping), so I substituted a pair of 1.0 mm jump rings instead.