My family and other animal jewellery 2022

Each year I look to find a subject to collect in costume jewellery. I source antique, vintage and pre-owned jewellery - as well as new. There are two criteria applied:

: It has to be cheap - usually £2 or less!

: Or it is unusual and rare or very collectable. If I pay more than £2.

For 2022, I decided to collect animal jewellery, as well as bird, insect, sea life and reptile pieces. My 2 year old grandson gave me the idea. I was watching him sort the many plastic animal toys and naming the various species. So just to start this year off. I am showcasing all the animal costume jewellery that I have at the moment. Most are in my own collection and some are for sale. 

Animal jewellery Part 1 (With a few eagle brooches thrown in!)

Black cat brooch on a pumpkin. Part of my Halloween jewellery collection. Made of resin and probably from the 1990s - 2000s.

Gold metal cat brooch - this one is stood on a broomstick and was made by Avon unsigned circa 1990s.

Egyptian chariot horse ring. Part of my own Egyptian jewellery collection. Unsigned. Gold tone metal with a black enamel to show the chariot riding Pharaoh cameo off. Vintage of about the 1970s

A Dalmatian dog brooch - modern in cream and black enamel (For sale) Costume jewellery made in the last 10 years. Pre -owned

Marcasite deer vintage brooch with a mother and baby (For sale) silver metal jewellery that is cute. Unsigned.

Another vintage marcasite stag deer brooch in silver metal. Unsigned and in own collection. Deer jewellery is ideal for wearing during the winter and at Christmas. 

A majestic vintage Egyptian eagle brooch. In my own collection. Enamel of green, turquoise, white and red with turquoise resin cabochon. Signed on the back but unfortunately unable to make out the manufacturer.   

Another eagle brooch. This is modern and brought for my birthday a couple of years ago. How time flies. In a dark gun metal colour with sparkling enamel and a pave of clear and black diamante. Very large and eye catching. This is a Butler & Wilson piece of jewellery and in my own collection.  

Now I collect junk jewellery in plastic. I have two of these plastic brooch pins. It has a cream horn with two dangles. This one has an Egyptian pyramid and a camel. So ideal for show casing in an animal jewellery collection.  

An ethnic brass bangle with an elephant pattern. This Asian elephant bangle also has green enamel and panels of mother of pearl shell. Rustic but very pretty. For sale and has been previously owned of unknown age.

Another animal bangle. This one has an African elephant pattern with trees in between. Made of resin to look like wood and previously owned. For sale.

Above are a selection of different vintage bracelets with elephants on. They were made as tourist pieces in the early part of the twentieth century. Each has a Hamsa hand dangle at the end. Some signed Morocco and some with a filigree finished amulet Hamsa hand. They are in my own collection of Ethnic jewellery.  

Now this is an unusual vintage celluloid necklace of elephants. It has a screw cap fastening in celluloid with a row of elephants in cream colour with small round beads. Then ending in an elephant pendant bead. The African elephants are all the same size. Unknown age, but probably late Victorian to early twentieth century. For sale. 

I love wearing this green enamel reindeer brooch at Christmas. Very festive and with a gold tone finish. I brought this one from a clothes shop in Solihull that has since closed down. It is in my own collection.

Another antique vintage brooch in my own collection. This is a French Depose celluloid brooch. It unfortunately has some parts missing. It depicts a horse drawn carriage with a gentleman standing by it. The missing pieces are a woman and reins to the horse. Cut out details in celluloid and has a twisted gold tone frame. Unmarked. This type of brooch was made with many different scenes and are very collectable. 

When I spotted this leopard ring, I just had to buy it. It was in a small stall at the Clothes Show at the NEC in Birmingham. About 8 years ago and was new. It is in brass with lots of sparkling green diamante and red eyes. This majestic big cat has a larger diamante in red held in its mouth. He is in my own collection 

Another brass ring in my own collection. This lion ring is all in brass just cast with the male king of the jungle lion features. I don't know why I like him but I do! It is in a small size - so think it is more for a female to wear.

Small but cute celluloid monkey charm. This vintage costume jewellery is part of a set of 3 - the other 2 lost in time. It shows the monkey with it's hands over it's eyes. For see no evil. Would have been part of a charm bracelet. For sale.

This is the second vintage elephant brooch that I have collected in plastic. The horn has two elephant charm dangles. From around the mid twentieth century and made to look like celluloid. In my kitsch plastic collection of cheap jewellery. 

Another monkey brooch that has found it's way into my plastic jewellery collection. Love the baby monkey on a branch with a mother monkey dangling below. In celluloid and has a brown finish on top of the cream.  

Apparently this is a vintage Barry Goldwater elephant brooch made in 1964 for the presidential election in America. No idea how it ended up on a vintage jewellery website in England. The website is long gone and sold cheap jewellery. I brought it and re-enamelled it. Sorry Barry but I changed the black glasses to blue. I hadn't a clue on what this cute little brooch stood for at the time. Just a few years ago I was researching political jewellery and came across this one. For sale as is. The new owner can change the glasses back to black - if they so wish.  

Another cute rabbit brooch. This one is part of my own collection and is a Mrs rabbit by Danecraft jewellery. In an all gold tone with pink and white enamel finished with green diamante eyes. Part of my own collection. She is watering flowers by a bird table.

This is a mr rabbit brooch by Danecraft. He is a gardener pushing a truck filled with red apples. Sporting a green pair of enamelled overalls. Part of my own collection, brought to make a picture for my husband for a wedding anniversary. The anniversary is long gone, but one day I will complete what I started out to do.

I will have another 3 blogs shortly of sea creatures, birds and reptiles. So follow this blog for more 

 

Collecting Gregg's plastic rings on cakes

Collecting Greggs plastic rings from their cupcakes. 

A while ago, the company Greggs Bakery sold cupcakes with brightly coloured plastic rings on the top as decoration. Stuck into the top of each cake was a ring, surrounded by buttercream. Aimed at kids and adults alike, it was a novel way to appeal and sell more cakes. Every now and then, I find them for sale in a car boot or charity shop. I always pick them up and give them a good wash before adding them to my fun cheap plastic jewellery collection. I have always collected plastic jewellery and I will be showing some of it on this blog at a later date.

Now while I researched these rings. I came across a story of a woman who thought they were edible and took a bit of one of these rings. She broke a tooth, wanted compensation and them banned because she thought they were dangerous!!! Most people just took them of the cakes and licked the buttercream of them. 

The above robust plastic ring is brightly coloured in yellow and red then shaped into a crown. It is quite large and wouldn't be able to be swallowed.

They are in quite a good finger size and fit a child to a small adult finger. With the split band, they have a slight stretch.

  Another crown plastic ring from Greggs bakery cakes. This time in bright pink and yellow plastic. They were I think princess or queen rings.

Then they had a range of googly eyed monster rings on the top of the cakes. Again in bright plastic colours.

Red plastic monster rings. I have two rings here - side by side. They are made quite robust. No stamps or signatures on them to indicate where they came from originally. But as I had brought these cakes for my family I knew where they originated from. Unfortunately being gluten intolerant. I don't go into this cake shop very often as they have very little for sale that I can eat. 

Then there is the cute purple monster ring. Not sure if they did anymore colours or designs of monsters. As I have only ever come across these two shapes.

He looks quite sad really with his horns and teeth in white on purple. Again big googly eyes that are quite appealing.

Then Greggs sold cupcakes around Halloween with a witch ring on the top. I love Halloween jewellery and so I have about 3 or 4 of these witch rings. I always buy cheap plastic and fun Halloween jewellery when I find it. As it is almost that time of year. I will have to show some of it in another blog soon.

This plastic witch ring has a typical witchy look. Black hat and hair with a bright green face and buckle trim on her hat. The front of the ring is a bit flatter and thinner than the other rings. Again the band has a split to allow some give when worn on different size fingers.

Then finally they produced a Father Christmas plastic ring on a Christmas inspired cupcake of course around Christmas time. This was a few years ago now - can't remember how many exactly, but I think about 4 or 5 years. This Father Christmas ring has a red hat with white pom-pom on. A traditional white curly beard and a jolly face. 

Not sure if they have these rings on cakes anymore as I don't shop at Greggs very often? But these are just a few of their novelty plastic rings that I have found out to photograph. They are fairly easy and a cheap way to collect something that is quite unusual. Just give them a good wash when you bring them home.   

Why we closed Jewels & Finery UK

Why we closed Jewels & Finery UK 

It was after 11 years of selling vintage jewellery and pre-owned jewellery on Jewels and Finery that we made the difficult decision to close our online store. (We were also known as vintage and handmade jewels). Last September, we noticed a rapid decline in sales and visits to the website. It just got worse and worse. Nothing we did seemed to do made any difference.

In January 2019, we noticed that our categories had multiple versions. In that our vintage brooches section had over 16 different versions of the same page. It was happening with all our main categories and even when we created new categories, it was also causing duplicates.

It wasn't the only problem that we had. The photographs on some items had just disappeared before Christmas. Leaving over 50 items without any pictures. Then it was noticed that our page speed had become so slow. To our horror, the other photographs had been converted from JPG to PNG. This makes a larger file and so slows a website. It meant that all the 1,500+ photographs would need to be either retaken or converted back to JPG. A huge undertaking. But the actual code on the website was also slowing it down and this was beyond our control. It would need major upgrading.

Unfortunately, these were not the only problems that we had. The blog attached to the website was in an HTTP formate - which shows up as unsecured. As a WordPress blog. It should have been in the https formate. But the company we were with did not seem to care. Had they given us a chance to upgrade we would have. But it meant that even if we took on another WordPress blog and swopped it - we couldn't use our website URL.

Now don't get me started on the sitemap. It was showing duplicate URLs, the blog as HTTPS!, wrong formatting and informing Google that it was changed weekly!. We paid another company to create a sitemap and uploaded it to Googles search console. Almost immediately it showed the number of URLs increased. It also seemed to update daily and be read by Google daily. With our own sitemap on the website. It hadn't changed or updated for months. No matter how many changes or submissions we did. I checked other sitemaps of other websites from the same company. The sitemaps were the same format.

There were a few other problems that kept occurring. Broken links to the newsletter. Which apparently took 3 weeks to sort. I am not sure if it then worked, as by this time I had had enough.

Yes, I repeatedly asked for it to be sorted out. But it was horrendous. From January to March I rang and was first told to get in touch with Google. Then eventually in March, it was put to the developers. we got an email 2 weeks after closing the store. Saying it was fixed!!!! The sitemap had apparently been fixed, but when I looked it had had just a couple of minor changes to priority - this took 3 weeks to do! The blog HTTP was still on there though. When I queried it I was told. that is how it will stay and no further changes were going to be made!

I had written on the forum that I was not happy and would be moving. Their reply was to give me an instant ban for life !!

Until a year ago. I would have recommended them. But they seemed to not know what they were doing. No communication and sudden moving of the facilities that we had signed up for. Analytics went - it was only available with a higher plan. I was paying over £70 a month as it was. You had to ask for everything back. Not very good practice for a company. They seem to start things. Like regular informative blog posts. Then it all stops. Instead of carrying on. Add a blog, then not maintain it. Start a "what do you want" forum post. Then not continue or communicate.

Worse was that we couldn't transfer any of the links created over the last 11 years. With all the duplicates it had done untold damage. We could not be sure this was fixed properly either. We also did not know what else had been wrong, had we or the website company been penalized by Google with so much other clutter around it was impossible to tell?

Unfortunately, we could not leave a review for the website provider, as they do not publish the bad ones - only the good reviews. No website can have all good reviews. It is impossible.

PS. We will be publishing all the research we did and had on the old website at some point as time allows.  

Dating Sarah Coventry pieces from 1976 Part 14

To continue with our look at the 1976 brochure from Sarah Coventry. This will aid identification and dating jewellery from the company. It also helps with dating other vintage jewellery by familiarizing the style of the pieces. Do this often enough and you will be able to see which era the brooch or necklace that you are trying to date is more likely to come from.

The following pages are taken from the Spring edition of the jewelry collection 1976, Sarah Coventry inc.

Page 44

Pixie Pets - a range of jewellery aimed at teenagers. Sarah Coventry produced several ranges aimed at the younger girl.

A = bluebird of happiness bracelet.
B = blue bird of happiness necklace.
C = Tina ring adjustable 1 - 4.
D = Pinkie ring.
E = Swingin' bear necklace 14 to 16 inch adjustable in silver tone.
F = Guppy pendants 14"
G = Guppy bracelet
H = Ann 'n Andy pendants 16"
I = Color trio bracelet with three changeable fronts.

Page 45

A = Bittersweet necklace (31" and 36" chains)
B = Bittersweet earrings (pierced)

Page 46
Earrings from Sarah Coventry

A = La grande hoop with surgical steel.
B = Chicken clips with one pair in gold tone and another in silver tone.
C = fashion loops in gold tone.
D = fashion loops in silver tone.
E = hula hoops with 14K overlay.
F = wedding band with 14k overlay.
G = tailored classic with surgical steel in silver tone.
H = Dove of peace with surgical steel wire.
I = twister with surgical steel in silver tone.
J = Charisma with surgical steel in silver tone.
K = Charisma in gold tone with surgical steel.
L = fiesta with surgical steel.
M = pierced ear wires with one pair in gold tone and another in silver tone.
N = twister in gold tone and surgical steel.
O = tailored classics in surgical steel and gold tone.
P = Zodiac circle in surgical steel.
Q = wedding ring in surgical steel.

A ll the above earrings were available but needed either the chicken clips or ear wires to make them for pierced ears or for clip on style earrings.

Just a few of the pre owned and vintage jewellery that have passed through our hands this week.

Vintage molten ring - adjustable 1970s in silver metal.

Ceramic vintage pendant signed Countess made in England. Renaissance art depicted on a pendant. Just add a chain.

Amber plastic cluster vintage clip-on earrings.