Vintage Amber Highlights: Fall 2009

Ingrida has brought back over 50 pieces of antique amber, bronze and copper jewelry from her fall travels. It’s hard to describe it all for each piece is filled with tremendous cultural and traditional meaning. Weddings, births, healings, and deaths, are marked in the metal of their patterns, and the antique spiritual amber is so softened in tone that it has become wise with age. 3 opaque yellow amber leaves wrap themselves about the story of the Sun in a late 1920’s art deco wedding necklace, cut “ modernly” to rest square between the bare neck and cloth covered breasts. An archaic bronze 1890’s Finnish pin of a village healer is marked by four lines of suns in a disk that would have protected her in both the light and dark of the world. A copper blacksmiths necklace of the guardian moon, made before WWI, offers the hand forged metal blessing of 3 moons wrapped in a great moon, from which is suspended a half moon made of thick amber which in its turn, holds a circle of pollen. A merchant’s necklace, odd in its metals, German silver and more archaic bronze, holds a piece of rare and perfect sea tossed amber polished into a great clear drop. The necklace falls into two separated metal patterns, the flat cut of silver to highlight the bare space beneath the neck, and the silver and rare amber to ornament the breasts. The bronze filigree of the classic piece is hand balled on the silver and represent warm suns over the moon colored metal. There was in this high studio necklace recognition that bronze was regarded then and now as the greatest of healers, more respected than gold. A Latvian copper healer’s pin of the pregnant female sun, offers in its feminine purity the beauty of the late 1800’s, with a simple fall of three triangles that mark the world of the earth forever with the gift of magic. The triangle necklaces of yellow and white amber, aged to deep warm honey, set on wound silver cord or German silver chain mail, bless the wearer with the love of the Mother of All Things, whom the young woman about to be married, embodied… Mother of Milk, Mother of Forest, Mother of Wind, Mother of Fields; countless mothers uncounted, within and without. Old pins, some of the amber 200 years old, 7 tiny perfect coin silver rings, a brilliant art deco pair of bronze and double cut amber cuff links among a collection of 1920’s cuff links, round out the collection with a great selection of old pieces for men and women. Of course our contemporary amber is still there as beautiful and as reasonable as ever.