Recently I started digging through my workshop and office looking for old and forgotten jewellery designs. Before long it turned into something like an archaeological dig. It started on my jewellery bench and progressed into dark corners of rarely opened cupboards. Let me tell you the story of where that digging took me.

I love little ceramic dishes - they're perfect for holding little components, stray gemstones and partly made jewellery pieces. I keep a number of them on my bench, some simply to collect bits and pieces that I don't know what to do with but want to keep hanging around. While digging through the dust and debris in these dishes I found a few partly finished old designs, which inspired me to dig further.

There were more little dishes lurking in cupboards and on shelves around my office and workshop. Then I started opening up dusty boxes - some filled with more boxes and bags. I found collections of unusual materials, gemstone beads, and broken vintage jewellery that had interested me enough to keep. But a number of containers held yet more jewellery pieces I'd made years ago, both partly finished designs and those made as experiments but never used.

I ended up with an array of jewellery designs in varying conditions and stages of being finished. Some I'd completely forgotten I'd made, while others were immediately familiar, even though I'd made them years ago. Seeing them all together on my desk made me realise I had something interesting - something worth putting out into the world.

So I got to work assessing which pieces could be used. I cleaned up some of those and finished others. Soon enough the From The Archives jewellery range started to emerge - with just one piece of each design available.

The Strange Memory That Lives in Your Hands

It was genuinely surprising to find jewellery pieces that I had pretty much forgotten about, yet once I was holding them I could clearly remember the process of making them in quite a tactile way.

This was especially the case for pieces I had made multiple times many years ago - I could remember the parts of the design where I had to be extra cautious or wanted to get a particular curve in a line I was sawing or filing.

For some of the one-of-a-kind pieces I still had a sense of where I was located at the time I was working on them and what my thinking was when I decided to create them.

For experimental or test pieces I had a sense of why I trialled that particular design, technique, or material - what I was hoping to achieve - and also why I decided against putting it into production (most often because it was simply too much work or too technically complex to be a viable product).

These were quite strange feelings, especially for largely forgotten pieces. I think there's something about making things with your hands that stays with you long after the work is done.

Old Metalwork Techniques, Rediscovered

In the Archives range there are a few techniques featured that I no longer regularly use. It was interesting - and in some cases bittersweet - to rediscover and think about those techniques. Here are a couple of examples.

Wax carving & casting

Some of the oldest jewellery designs in the Archives range were made by hand carving wax pieces to have them cast in silver. I enjoyed this process and discovered I had a real aptitude for it, so I did a fair bit of it when I was first learning to make jewellery (an example of this work is the Three Button Jacket below).

Going from a hand carved wax to a piece cast in metal is something I always found slightly terrifying: many hours of careful, detailed and perfectly finished work would be melted away as part of the process. I'd always worry that all of my effort would be lost and the process would fail somehow. Thankfully it never happened.

These days I do have designs cast, but I no longer carve wax to do this. Finding these pieces made me think about returning to it one day. I've always been drawn to carving as a way of creating object art and jewellery pieces - in wax and other materials - and I've found myself missing doing it.

Intricate saw-piercing

When you're learning to be a jeweller, a common starting point is learning to saw metal with a very fine jeweller's saw. It's a rite of passage to get to grips with this deceptively difficult skill without losing your mind in the process (the seemingly never-ending broken saw blades, the misaligned cut that ruins a piece you've spent hours on, the occasional sawn finger ... the trauma is real).

Eventually I fell in love with doing intricate saw-piercing work - and I came to be good at it. For quite a long time my jewellery business featured a lot of these intricate handmade designs and the Archives range features a number of pieces that I meticulously saw-pierced by hand.

Creating work like this requires a huge amount of time-consuming labour ... and it turns out that nobody is willing to pay what it truly costs. About a decade ago I got to the point that I was working 100+ hours a week, earning considerably less than the average wage, and my hands, back and shoulders were falling apart from over-work (the latter being a major problem for someone with a connective tissue disorder).

It was entirely unsustainable and something had to change. In a state of exhaustion after another frantic festive season, I wrote about these issues several years ago: Time For A Change.

These days I still create intricate designs, but they are cast rather than all being individually sawn out by hand. I kind of miss the serendipity of this sort of making, but I don't miss the pain, the long hours, and the entirely unsustainable nature of it.

Some Jewellery Pieces With Stories Attached

Three Button Jacket & An Old Friendship

The Three Button Jacket pendant necklace is a design that transported me back to another time. It was created very early in my career - almost 30 years ago, in fact.

This whimsical sterling silver design was inspired by a dear old friend: a talented photographer who always wore vintage 1960s suit jackets, which he insisted should only ever have 3 front buttons: no more, no less.

Finding the piece made me miss my old friend, but it also made me think about a time when I was learning how to carve waxes for casting and enjoying the different forms I could create with this technique.

Very few of these jacket pendants were ever made and at the time of writing this I have just two left: one is available in the From The Archives range and the other will remain in my personal jewellery collection.

Three Old Pendants That Became Something New

I made six very detailed sterling silver panels which were turned into three pendant necklaces. These pieces were created to be shown in an exhibition.

The panels were based on antique architectural metalwork designs that had been rendered into Victorian era illustrations - collections of these renderings always fascinated me. I wanted to recreate a suite of these designs in miniature as jewellery, but I also wanted them to be obviously handmade.

I sawed each panel out by hand, making the lines very fine and organic. I left the saw marks in place and didn't try to make the pieces perfect, so they still show the obvious signs of my labour from years ago.

Being jewellery designs created purely for an exhibition, they weren't especially practical as necklaces - the pendants would catch on each other and this would eventually cause scratches and dents.

When I rediscovered them during my recent hunt for old jewellery designs, it seemed sad to have these very labour-intensive pieces just sitting in a box doing nothing. I was keen to finish them in a form that someone could comfortably wear. Given I had a matched pair of each design, pairs of earrings were the obvious solution - and you can see the re-finished earrings below, as seen in the From The Archives range.

Strange Materials & Happy Accidents

During my archaeological diggings I rediscovered a few unusual metals and interesting experiments.

Copper alloy & bonded metal

One interesting metal found in the range is Shakudō, which is a Japanese alloy of copper with gold. Traditionally it's chemically patinated to have a blue-black finish, but I decided to use the raw metal simply because I liked the colour. There is just one experimental design using this unusual metal alloy in the Archives range: the Shakudō Flowers Gold & Silver Pendant Necklace.

Another unusual metal was a bonded sheet with sterling silver on one side and copper on the other. I liked that you could have the silver side safely against your skin, but could enjoy the vibrant colour of the copper on the other side.

See the Quatrefoil Copper & Silver Pendant Necklace and matching Quatrefoil Stud Earrings as the only remaining examples I have of jewellery made with this metal, which it seems is no longer available.

Gold finishes

There are also some gold finishes that I haven't used in a long time and which I'm considering using again now I've rediscovered them.

I found another bonded metal that I can still source: 9ct gold bonded to silver, which is a great way to get real gold colouring and an all precious metal construction without the very high cost of solid gold. It's something I'm thinking about using again in future, but for now the only design available is this pair of mismatched Gold & Silver Flower Stud Earrings.

Another interesting gold finish featured in the Archives collection is keum-boo: a Korean technique using 24ct gold foil which is bonded by hand to silver. I was taught this technique decades ago by a very talented fellow jewellery student who is Korean. I used it for a number of designs over quite a few years and I'm thinking I will do so again in future. For now the only example of this technique is found in this Gold & Silver Paisley Pendant Necklace.

A beautiful failed experiment

There is one piece that I really love the look of but which I couldn't put into the Archives collection because it's just too vulnerable.

Years ago I did an experiment of setting a watch crystal into a fairly large bezel setting to make a pendant. At the rear of the setting is an etched pattern and in the space between the pattern and the crystal is a collection of loose gemstones of different types and sizes. The stones move around freely in the space.

It's a really interesting piece of jewellery and I love the kinetic nature of it, but it isn't watertight, meaning water and other fluids can easily get under the crystal, increasingly causing problems and making the piece difficult to clean.

I still love this experimental piece, but it was a failure as a wearable piece of jewellery (other than perhaps just for me).

How I Accidentally Started Selling Jewellery Online

During my digging I found a pair of earrings which I haven't put into the From The Archives collection as they are too simple and have barely any metal in them. But I was so happy to find them as they are very significant to me.

The earrings feature pieces of peacock feather: the shafts are wrapped with very fine silver wire, with loops formed to hang them from ear wires.

These very basic earrings were created almost exactly 20 years ago. At the time I was entirely unconvinced that anyone would ever buy jewellery online. However, I'd heard about a new online venue for handmade products called Etsy and decided I'd give it a go to see what would happen.

I didn't think it was worth putting much effort into setting up, so sure was I that this experiment would fail. So I made a few extremely simple designs, hastily photographed them and listed them for sale on Etsy.

I sold a pair of these peacock feather earrings within 30 minutes of listing them. And that was the start of my online jewellery selling career.

Bringing This Jewellery Into the Light

As I'm writing this, all of the selected pieces for the From The Archives range are fully finished: they've been photographed, the descriptions have been written, and soon enough I expect they'll be heading out of my hands and into those of our lovely customers.

I actually feel a little bit sad about this because these are pieces I've hung onto for years - sometimes decades. Many of them contain a great deal of my labour. Each one has a story of some sort associated with it: some are as simple as "I made too many of these and I just had to stop!", while others have connections to important people and times in my life.

But I also feel happy that these pieces of my history have been brought out of forgotten dusty dishes and boxes to be finished and freshened up - finally ready to take on a new life out there in the world. I truly hope they will be treasured.

What Comes Next

The From The Archives range is just the start of the celebrations we have planned for my 30 years of making jewellery and 20 years of running an online store. With this unusual range I've started by looking backwards: to pieces made years ago, some almost forgotten and each one carrying a little piece of my history.

Later this year I'll be launching a brand new range of production jewellery inspired by that same history: familiar shapes, ideas and techniques from years past, rendered into something new. I'm genuinely excited about it.

In the meantime, if something in the Archives range has caught your eye, I hope you'll give it a home. There is just one of each piece available - and I can't think of a better outcome for this jewellery than for it to finally be worn and loved.

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