So the Seattle Metals Guild held their Northwest Jewelry and Metals Symposium over the weekend. I was on the organising committee and had been put in charge of the ‘book room’. Charon Kransen – stop me if you’ve heard it – sent over a bunch of boxes of books from New York, and my job was to set them out neatly, mind the books, and make sales. And talk wise about the ones that I had work in… (OK, so I might have added that last part. That was not an official committee-sanctioned responsibility.)
Thus I was wandering through the board room and store room of the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill in the early morning of Saturday. In order to have a signing table for our two speakers with books and catalogues to sign, I stepped into the store room to grab an extra trestle table. At one point in a very delicate exercise of collapsing the thing to get it out the door (lets not ask why a trestle table of 1800mm x 800mm was doing standing assembled in a room of 2m x 3m that was filled with other disused furniture), my left hand lost purchase and whacked the wall pretty hard.
Lucky for me, my engagement rings took the brunt of the hit. Unlucky for them though. Well, one in particular…
So I’ve busted one of these before (no, not the same one – last time it was a white-gold one, promise!), though last time it was snagged on a vinyl mat in the gym, while I was rolling over doing some stretches. Yeah, hard-core. And of course, as I am fond of telling people when they ask about them (and almost 8 years into wearing them, I am still asked about them regularly) each of the top plates that the diamonds are set into did once all turn on their stems. But them being 18k gold, and me being a natural fidget-er who is always trying to hide it, I eventually wore them all down, until their little heads all plopped off and all I had was plain gold rings with stems on. Oh, and a separate small collection of beautifully set diamonds on tiny plates that had holes in the back.
The wonderful Gillian Rainer, who made them, solidly affixed the little heads back on their stems a few years ago now, but the last stem-break, just like this one will soon be, was fixed by me. If I wasn’t a jeweller I would definitely send them back to the artist, but in this circumstance, I figure the ‘you broke it, you own it’ rule applies.