Since Polly came back to the bench in 2007 after a 30 year hiatus, her work has been, and still is, influenced by the ancient jewellers; mycenaean, Egyptian, Persian and of course Roman. Recently we’ve been drawn to Roman design quite a lot, in particular intaglio work. The history of intaglio is a whole story in itself, but I just …
The word jet used to conjure up images of clouds flying by below and a gut full of excitement, but not so these days. These days the jet I’m thinking about is black and shiny and used in jewellery. I didn’t know anything about it and wonder whether I can tell you anything you didn’t already know on the subject; …
For as long as I can remember I’ve had a Mother of Pearl fish like this swimming around in my various boxes; I didn’t know what it was or where it came from and then when I came across it the other day I decided to try and find out. It turns out it’s a Chinese gaming chip, and the …
When PGG started in 2007 we used, out of necessity, a lot of stones that Polly had in stock already from long ago, or we bought quite inexpensive stones to start off with till we saw how it went. Among these were some flat faceted beads of banded agate and I confess that at the time, while I did acknowledge …
Back in the day as a fledgling magpie I wore lots of silver, and now as a full grown magpie I have managed to up my game to lots of gold (very lucky me!) but it must be said that I do still love silver, and not just in jewellery but as a metal from which so much can …
Ever since I was a fledgling magpie I’ve loved lime green as a colour. In fact I had the walls in my first solo bedroom painted lime green and I must have been about 8, so it’s been my thing for a very long time! No surprise then that every time I go into the stock tray for something, the …
One of the great features (and there are many to choose from!) about Polly’s jewellery is her use of semi-precious stones. They’re not always cheap by any means, but they go so perfectly with the yellow metal, and quite a plain stone can be lifted to new heights by 22ct gold. One stone that ticks all the semi-precious boxes is …
It could be considered a negetive side effect of the pandemic that hardly any gems are arriving in this country at the moment, or it could actually be viewed as a benefit… it means that we’ve been forced to really sort out our stock and find lovely things we’ve forgotten about, and make something with them. This is exactly how …
When I was doing my research for ‘Hey, Pinkie!’ I came across this pot of coral beads the palest of which caught my eye – as I was thinking pink – and Polly told me it’s called ‘angel skin’. How lovely is that! She also suggested that coral would be a good subject for an article and of course she’s …
While I was bathing in Vitamin D among my pots full of every colour pink geraniums, I got to thinking about pink gems and wondering what else there is out there apart from tourmaline, which we use all the time. We don’t use a lot of pink stones so I thought I’d try and figure out why not. It turns …
