Recycling at its most beautiful - bone china flower jewellery

Back in 2013 I found a beautiful, vintage bone china pansy brooch in a charity shop.  I recalled elegant ladies of my Grandmothers' generation wearing fabulously naturalistic and delicate floral brooches just like it when I was a child.  I knew I had to have it, but frankly I'm just not a brooch kind of girl.  I set about converting it into a ring and it proved really popular.  People started asking me if they could have one too.  A new Urban Magpie range was born.

My original pansy ring

Most of the famous pottery manufacturers in the Staffordshire area of the UK seem to have produced bone china flower jewellery from the 1930's to about the 1970's. The brooches, clip earrings & hatpins were all handmade and skilfully hand painted. 
I like to think that by up-cycling them into rings I'm celebrating this craftsmanship & giving their work a new lease of life.

Packing a punch

When I acquire the vintage flowers they've usually been languishing forgotten at the bottom of jewellery boxes and are often in a sorry state.  I clean them up & start the painstaking restoration process.  I file out any chips, sometimes having to completely re-sculpt individual leaves and petals with my trusty multitool.  Next I re-paint & varnish the damaged areas to blend them in with the original paintwork.  Finally they're fixed to silver plated adjustable ring bases.

Restoration work in progress

The flower rings proved popular, but my next concern was what to do with all the old, redundant clip-on flower earrings I kept acquiring. The blooms were too small to turn into rings, but it seemed a shame to let them go to waste. The solution was to recycle them into a collection of dainty floral hair slides. 

My popular hair slides

At the start of this year I felt ready to take the range a bit further and started incorporating the vintage flowers into simple pendants and statement necklaces.  The first pieces from the new collection have just gone on sale this week at my central Leeds stockist Our Handmade Collective and you can have a look at what's in store on my Facebook page.

One of the vintage flower necklaces

The rings are also available from my online Folksy shop.

Custom order - a story of white feathers and clairvoyants

I think I enjoy custom orders more than any other project, but particularly when they have a deep personal significance.

Just before Christmas, my friend Lianne commissioned me to make some necklaces as gifts for her family.  Lianne gave me some pointers about the kinds of styles or colours they might like.  The brief for her Mum's necklace, however, was a bit more specific.

A while ago Lianne's Mum visited a clairvoyant, who had told her that if she saw a white feather it signified that her late Mother was thinking of her.  The belief that white feathers are the calling card of a guardian angel goes way back into the mists of time, but is still popular today.

The necklace was to feature a white feather, so I started sketching up some designs and searching for a suitable vintage feather charm.

An initial necklace design

Appropriately enough, once I started looking for feathers they started turning up everywhere.  The difficult bit was choosing the 'right' one, as it needed to be big enough to have some impact.  Once I'd acquired a substantial & pleasingly tactile 1980's metal feather brooch, I got to work removing the clasp & coating it with glossy white enamel paint.

The feather brooch, part way through conversion

The white feather was hung from a loose plait of black seed beads and gold chains, set off with some chunkier back & white beads.  I couldn't resist painting a tiny white wing charm, to finish off the extension chain.  

"Feathers appear when angels are near"