Building Your Jewelry Wardrobe, Part One: T.L.C.

I love helping people build their jewelry wardrobe.  As you might imagine, “building a jewelry wardrobe” doesn’t mean buying everything in sight, anymore than most people would take that approach when it comes to clothing or furniture.  We buy things we love that complement things we already have, fill in gaps, and sometimes we decide we want to expand a bit, too.  Nothing wrong with that. 

Let’s talk about taking care of the jewelry you already own and love.

Part One:  Taking Care of Your Jewelry:  A Little Maintenance
Goes a Long Way.

When you have things you love, you take care of them.  In the case of clothing, that means a regular trip to the dry cleaner and shoe repair.  Furniture doesn’t ask much—a shine now and then, perhaps a little T.LC. (“tender loving care”) to repair a nick on the surface.

Jewelry not only attracts attention when you wear it—especially you :>; it also needs attention at home.  Let’s take a look at jewelry set with prongs.  Well, you can take a look at it—the light shines clear through it.  That’s the magic.

But where a diamond or other gemstone with a bezel setting is protected on all sides (or, with the half-bezel, the stone is partially protected) from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, those prongs we were just talking about don’t cover all that much of the stone.

At the beginning, that’s not a problem, assuming you bought your jewelry from a reputable source:  the prongs in the setting hug the stone.  If the prong jewelry in question is a pendant, you’ll be fine for the foreseeable future. 

But think about a ring.  Some people sleep with their rings on.  Most people wear them at work.  So you turn in bed and the prong catches on the sheet, just a little, and you gently pull it back and maybe in the morning look, and it seems fine.  Or you’re talking with John or Kim about that project and your hand bumps against the phone as you’re checking something. 

A fly on the wall would tell you that both times the tip of the prong was bent, and in one case part of it broke off.  Tiny.  Easy to miss.

Another night tossing and turning, more projects at work, games with the kids, presentations, camping—so many opportunities for the tip of the prong to snap off and the prong itself to get yanked (just a bit each time), and then “Where did the stone go?”

Tip:  Write the date you bought your prong jewelry (or the date you received it) on your calendar.  Put it in the media you use for keeping track of appointments.  Now add a reminder every three to six months (depending on how active you are) to have the prongs checked to make sure they’re intact and see if they might need to be tightened or the tips or whole prongs might need to be replaced.  (You don’t want to overdo the tightening—remember, the prongs put pressure on the stone—but you want to be sure the prongs are strong and secure.)

Enjoy!  Prong jewelry does require attention, but seeing the light through the stone—doesn’t that make it worth a little effort?

©2014 Laynie Tzena.

Time Travel

Once upon a time, a woman had a beautiful five-strand pearl necklace. She wore it often. This was the "Jazz Age," and faux pearls were all the rage. Karl Lagerfeld designed with them.

But alas, the pearl necklace broke one day. And she never wore it again. When she died, "Grandmother's pearl necklace" was given to Carrie. Who brought it to me.

At first, we thought we'd just make it into a three-strand necklace. Surely there were enough loose pearls to do that. But no. This is a graduated pearl necklace, and the remaining pearls weren't all of the right size. We needed more pearls. Graduated faux pearls. From that time period. In the same color family. I looked hither and thither and what do you know?

Then one day Carrie took out a sheet of notebook paper and made a sketch of a pair of earrings she had seen someone wearing. I used that drawing as a starting point for these earrings, which accompany a graduated bracelet that seemed only fitting to go with her necklace.

Turned out we also had enough pearls for a graduated single-strand necklace to go with her bracelet.

Last but not least, Carrie had mentioned that her grandmother grew roses. So some of the remaining pearls show up here:

And here:



Carrie tells me her father and uncle were amazed to see the restored necklace. The last person they'd seen wearing those pearls, of course, was their mother--"Grandmother," to Carrie.

©2009-2015 Laynie Tzena.