View our Previous Newsletters

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY COLLECTING?

Do you love sparkling rhinestone jewelry, stacks of colorful Bakelite bangles, bracelets filled with charms, or Native American sterling and turquoise jewelry from the Southwest? Or perhaps you are drawn to something entirely different.

Fur clips from the 1940s are one of my favorites. They can be intricate, wonderfully creative, and surprisingly easy to wear. I also have a soft spot for jewelry with enamel work in part because the beautiful colors and delicate enamel details can make even a small piece something special.

Jewelry lovers collect for so many different reasons. Some collect the work of a particular maker. Others look for pieces that remind them of jewelry their mother or grandmother wore. And then there are those wonderful pieces that simply stop you because you have never seen anything quite like them before.

That is one of the things I enjoy most about collecting jewelry: there is always something unexpected to discover.

At Morning Glory Jewelry, we have a wide variety of vintage, designer and antique jewelry, and I am continually adding new pieces to the website. If you enjoy discovering unusual jewelry as much as I do, I hope you will visit often and see what is new.

VICTORIAN COLLECTIONS

The Victorians loved to collect, and their interests could be wonderfully varied. They were especially drawn to things connected with nature, travel, and the wider world. They like objects that could be brought home and displayed.

Some of these collections found their way into jewelry. The Victorians and their successors used iridescent scarab beetle wings, butterfly wings, shells, fossils, unusual stones, and other natural materials to create fascinating pieces. Taxidermy was popular too, bringing the natural world indoors and preserving it under glass. Decorative objects and sculpture from the Art Nouveau period also became part of the Victorian and Edwardian fascination with bringing beautiful, exotic things into the home.

Travel opened up an entirely new world of collecting. Railway travel expanded rapidly in the 1840s, making journeys faster and increasingly affordable. In fact, the need for standardized railway timetables was one of the important reasons Greenwich Mean Time became the standard reference for railway time in Britain. Before standardized time, different towns could have slightly different local time which was a potentially serious problem for train schedules.

And of course, travelers wanted souvenirs of the places they visited. Jewelry was a particularly wonderful way to bring a little piece of a journey home. Scottish agate, for example, was fashioned into beautiful jewelry and souvenirs, while hand carved Whitby jet from northern England became especially famous for mourning jewelry.

I love the idea that some of the jewelry we collect today began with that same human impulse: to find something beautiful, unusual, or meaningful and bring it home as a reminder of a place, a person, or a moment.

We have a wonderful selection for sale on our web site.

TO BUY Victorian jewelry, see our selection HERE.

TO BUY interesting vintage jewelry...

Morning Glory Antiques and Jewelry click HERE.

And stay tuned as we share more marvelous jewelry for sale in the coming weeks, as we have for over 32 years now!

NEW ADDITIONS
Morning Glory adds recent acquisitions often and you can always see them here:

http://www.morninggloryjewelry.com/