Making a Necklace

Somehow, I've been slowing drifting into jewelry making.  I made tree pendants as Christmas gifts and have dabbled with other things.  Then, Chris decided to try.  And discovered that it's fun and simple.

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately, it's addicting to find cool beads. We've been having fun finding historical portraits with jewelry examples.

One of my favorites has some interesting vase shaped beads. We were lucky enough to find some beads like this recently, and I finally got a chance to put something together.

The inspiration painting is in the MET, painted by by Andrea Solario from ca.1507-1509.



This is earlier than I usually research, but I really love those vase beads.  While enameled jewelry and long chains are common later in the century, there are examples that show beaded short necklaces with a pendant like we see here.

• 1567 English: Susan Bertie

•  16th Century Italian: Portrait of a Lady

I realized that I needed a pendant to complete the look and remembered the amazing laurel pendant I was gifted.  It was made by the amazing Lesley Wilson of Darkwood Armoury.  She only made a few... I'm not even sure how many.  I only know of one other.  It is based on a the Phoenix Jewel in the British Museum.



So, I set about stringing something up.  Here's the finished piece.  It was a lot of fun to make and took longer to research than to assemble.

Goose!

A few years ago, I went down a rabbit hole chasing the history of a game known as Goose.

I was able to find some extant prints from the end of the 16th century of Goose boards.

• Print Board Game, 1588 (appears to be Goose)
• Print Board Game, 1588 (also appears to be Goose)
• Print Board Game, 1590's
• Print Board Game, 1589
• Print Board Game, 1598 (appears to be Goose) 

These all seem to be from Italy.  Here's a sample of the last one above.


Goose is characterized by having a spiral layout board with 63 spaces, some of which have geese or other "traps" such as a maze, death, etc. It's a fun little game to play and doesn't require much thought or strategy.  For more details, check out Masters Traditional Games.

In my searches, I came across another Goose board, that has become my favorite for it's simplicity and beauty.  Unfortunately, I found it as a reference one another webpage and was unable to find anything further about it's supposed location or date.

Luckily, over the years more museums and collections are available online.  While still not a perfect reference, I've been able to find what I believe is the home of this rouge Goose board.  To my surprise, it is a print block from 1590, instead of just a print. See the Cartoxia website for as many details as I can find.

Here's a picture of the print block, and a print from it.

You might notice that this is the background for my blog.  Happy Goosing!