I'm Back (Again).

I am back to work at the shop again after taking a week off. This year we didn't go anywhere so we had a staycation but we did manage to get to a couple of museums.  We went up to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to see the Faberge exhibit there.  Unfortunately there were only three eggs on display, and none of them were shown open, however there was a lot of other work that came out of the Faberge house that was interesting as well. It is certainly worth a trip and the museum itself is beautiful and has a number of other interesting exhibits (the Chinese house is quite something although I recommend you don't go when it's 95 degrees out as we did as the house is outside and they didn't have air conditioning in them when it was built).

We also got back to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  I can't remember if I wrote about this previously, but the last time we went, I was excited to see a special jewelry exhibit they had up.  Unfortunately it was one of the worst jewelry exhibits I have ever seen in a museum, with virtually nothing of interest worth looking at.  However on this trip we went into the Egyptian section and had a chance to see the jewelry on display there (all the time).  Now this was a great exhibit. There are a number of Egyptian, Etruscan and Roman pieces there that are excellent examples of the amazing work that was done in those periods, with none of the tools that we have available to us today.  They had one Etruscan piece in particular that had an amazing example of the fine granulation work done during the period. The beads on the piece were so small they looked like dust, but they were most definitely individual gold beads.  When these pieces were made they had to use blow torches, they had no steel so they couldn't pull wire but had to make it either by twisting thin pieces of sheet together or hammering it out, and absolutely everything was done by hand (no Cad/Cam in those days!). 

In the meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm working on some interesting custom pieces and a new chain link design that I hope to have out in the next month or two.  Please note my new summer hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday 11-6 and Saturday 11-5, Thursdays 6-8 by appointment only.  The piece pictured above is a custom job I did for some customers a number of years ago which came back for a cleaning recently.  It's 18k yellow gold with sapphires and diamonds.