Tax Free Day is Coming (Maybe)!

18k yellow gold with amethysts, diamonds and freshwater pearls

There was a short blurb in the Boston Globe this week that the state legislature is considering authorizing another tax free weekend (August 10-11) sometime in the upcoming week.  In the last ten or twelve years they have only skipped the tax free weekend once, so I'm pretty certain that they will push the bill through again this year. Unfortunately the governor usually likes to wait until the last minute to sign the bill into law but there doesn't seem to be any reason for them not to have it this year so I'm pretty certain it will be a fact. 

And along with tax free weekend Daniel R. Spirer Jewelers, has their annual one day sale!  So it's sale time again.  Please note that you must be an existing customer to take part in this sale so if all you've ever done is read my blog and you haven't been in before the sale won't do you any good. However you can still take advantage of the tax free part of the weekend (and then next year you can take advantage of the sale).  Sales up to $2500 are tax free (but if the piece is $3000, you still have to pay tax on the entire amount) and if you want to place an order and pay for it in full on tax free day, that is also tax free (again up to $2500).  For my regular customers who are readers here, we are again offering that you can come in the week ahead of time and pick out what you would like, leave us a credit card number and we will just run it through on tax free day (since it seems like everyone is away every weekend this summer).  So if you're thinking your husband or wife should be buying you a nice Christmas gift from me this year send him in, or if you have been yearning for a pair of my earrings to match one of your rings from me, or if you're just fed up with not having any new things to wear in your life, then come on in! Details will be sent out on our email list as soon as the law is actually signed by the governor. 

The earrings pictured above have amethysts and diamonds in 18k yellow gold. 

Danwardian Style Earrings

18k and 22k gold earrings with South Sea Pearls and Garnets

I had a customer come in recently whose wife apparently is watching some show on television now that takes place during the Edwardian period and for a 25th wedding anniversary present he wanted to give her a pair of earrings reminiscent of the period.  He wanted it to be a pearl drop but we went around a few times about the other stones he wanted to use and finally ended up going with tsavorite garnets.  As always the design kind of evolved as I was working on it.  He wanted the top piece as you see it here (a little commercial looking for my taste, but it did seem to be used during the period) but the rest was up to me.  The pearl caps came next and making the garnets work on them properly was a bit challenging as I didn't want the settings sticking out too far. Then I was originally going to do two straight links connected to each other but I couldn't get them to look right doing that so I threw out that idea altogether and used just the one link and made up some 22k gold balls to go above them.  Et voila! Danwardian earrings! If you're all lucky some day I'll stop making all these bad play on words!

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. 

I Kind of Cover a Wide Range and I Work Near MIT

Some people are surprised over the range of the type of work I do.  Even within what I have out in the store I do cover a fairly wide swath of types of work. Admittedly much of my work is easily identifiable as coming from me, but with custom work, I can pretty much take on any job (although if you're looking for a plain Tiffany style setting I'll probably send you elsewhere as I'll just charge too much to do something so readily available everywhere).  As I mention in the title to the post I work near that fine higher education institution MIT.  Over the years this has led to any number of unusual and interesting jobs. 

One of them started with a phone call we got late on a Thursday asking if we could solder platinum.  I said of course and the guy proceeded to tell me that he had a platinum piece that needed a precise soldering job, that it had to be done right away, that it was going up into space shortly and that he couldn't tell me what exactly we were working on (for security reasons, not because he didn't know). Now how could I turn down something like that?  I love space and all that has to do with it, it wasn't going to be the usual "can you fix my platinum ring" job and we could only guess at what we were actually working on.  To this day I have no idea what it was for.  But we did get the job done for them by their Saturday deadline.

Another time we got a young guy in who was a graduate student at MIT and his thesis was on how people perceived urban landscapes.  He had built a contraption that he wanted to wear over his head that had a mechanism that would cover his right eye when he took a step with his left foot and cover his left eye when he took a step with his right foot.  Again, I wasn't really clear what he was trying to achieve, but I told him I would see what I could come up with.  For this one I sat down and brainstormed with a very old and dear friend of mine (who happens to be an extraordinary bench jeweler) and we came up with the idea of using the loupes that we wear to see things close up.  We were able to attach his contraption to a loupe without the lens on it and it allowed him to move it up and down as he wanted to in front of his face.  Unfortunately he never came back and told us if his thesis was accepted!

So the picture above is of a recently completed pair of wedding bands.  We had to use CAD/CAM to do these because the customer wanted "logic gates" engraved all around the bands.  Unfortunately you can't truly see how they change as they go around the ring but you can get an idea of what they look like from the picture.  What are logic gates, some of you might ask?  I haven't got the foggiest idea, although I'm sure I could Google it and find out but I think I'll leave that up to those of you who would like to know.  These bands were done in platinum.


But on the bottom here are some earrings that I just put out that show the other extreme of my work range.  They are 22k and 18k yellow and white gold with freshwater pearls and carved labradorite faces.  I thought they made a nice juxtaposition against the interesting, yet completely different bands above!

 

Summer is Here and More On Why I Do What I Do

Summer has finally arrived, both technically and in reality.  We're in the middle of a short heat wave here and my faithful employee came back from a trip downtown for me complaining about how disgusting it is outside.  Fortunately we're well air conditioned here.


Because it is summer, I wanted to let people know a few things about upcoming schedules.  We will be closed the week of July 4 (June 30-July8) for a break (no trips planned this year) and for the months of July and August we will be changing our hours slightly.  During this period we will be open until 8 on Thursdays by appointment only.  Otherwise we will be closing at 6. Also we will be closing an hour earlier on Saturdays at 5. So our hours will look like this: Tue, Wed, Thur, Fri 11-6 and Sat 11-5 but open by appointment only on Thursday evenings until 8.

It's been an interesting month in a number of ways.  I saw my pearl/opal dealer again, and despite my vow not to buy anything from him, I still came away with some interesting strands of South Sea keshi pearls (pictures will follow as soon as they are strung), a beautiful pair of boulder opals and a strand of boulder opal beads (not round ones).  Unfortunately the opal beads seem to have been laid claim to by my wife so, while I will get a picture of them up at some point, this particular strand won't be available.

I also recently spent some time with a new customer working out what she wanted for an engagement ring.  This was her second marriage and her first husband had died awhile ago.  She wanted to use some older diamonds she had and I was happy to accommodate her. What was interesting about it though was the long discussion we had about how the diamonds had come to her, why she wanted to use them, how good her first marriage had been (despite the fact that much to her dismay her original engagement ring was a family piece that she didn't like---but she wore anyway because, as she said, sometimes you just have to give up some things for a relationship to work), and how excited she was about her new relationship.  During a good deal of this conversation I had another customer waiting.  When the first one had left the store, the second one said to me: "I had no idea how much like a therapist you are!".  And in some ways, truer words were never spoken.  Sure I make and sell jewelry and run a small business as best I can, but because of the product I deal in, there is a tremendous amount of emotion, sentiment, love, and memory involved, and as someone who is assisting customers with their pieces that carry these feelings, I tend to hear a lot of it.  However, not only do I not mind this, I actually really enjoy it.  I get a chance to learn about new people, and to hear stories of important events in all of their lives.  It always makes me stand in awe of what meaning is attached to my pieces as well.  And that kind of sums up why I do what I do. 

Speaking of meaning, love and emotion, the picture above was given to me recently by a couple whose engagement ring and wedding bands I custom made for them. They were made of 18k white and yellow gold and her engagement ring has a blue sapphire in it.