Queen Munch and Queen Nibble

My daughter's favourite bed time story just now is Carol Ann Duffy's Queen Munch and Queen Nibble. The two queens' personalities are described through their dress: one is colourful, noisy and gregarious (and loves food), the other is 'like a stick of celery', contemplative, and never hungry. While Queen Munch's queendom is as 'splendid as gingerbread', Queen Nibble likes nothing better than to make rain jewellery:

When it rained she would rush outside, pull her long silver needle from one pocket and her golden thread from another and rush up and down, threading and stitching the rain as it fell.

She made wonderful necklaces from the rain, beautiful earrings and pretty rings, faulous tiaras and twinkling cufflinks. This amazing jewellery was kept under guard in Nibble Castle in a glass case which read:

JEWELS FROM THE RAIN OF QUEEN NIBBLE

and nobody was allowed to touch it.

Of course, this sad state of affairs is changed forever, when the two queens meet and the rain comes down. But you must read it for yourself, or your daughter, to find out how this happens, and to wonder at Duffy's sensitive drawing of attitudes to life through the things that we surround ourselves with.

true tales

I found this short story in Paul Auster's True Tales of American Life, a collection of stories drawn from public submissions to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project in 1999:


Star and Chain

In 1961, during a visit to Provincetown, Massachusetts, I bought a hand-crafted one-of-a-kind Star of David on a chain. I wore it all the time. In 1981 the chain broke while I was swimming in the ocean off Atlantic City, and I lost it in the surf. In 1991, during Christmas vacation, my fifteen year old son and I were poking around in an antique shop in Lake Placid, new York, when a piece of jewelry caught his eye. He called me over to take a look. It was the Star of David that had been swallowed up by the ocean ten years before.

Steve Lacheen

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

RCA and sociology

I've been trawling the web recently for appearances of jewellery in literature and instead ended up at the RCA website, looking at research projects.

Antje Illner is interesting from the point of view of ensemble, in that she is exploring unusual materials and processes, and has collaborated with product designers to develop surfaces for mobile phones. She has also created interactive installations for Swatch.

The research strategy for the goldsmithing, silversmithing, metalwork and jewelley department states that its Sociological Issues strand is so far less focused than other areas, and that despite becoming 'central in much contemporary debate', remains a more difficult one to approach. Perhaps this is because we take for granted the meanings of jewellery in everyday life, negotiating them on a daily basis; if so, current everyday western jewellery offers the social anthropologist a rich ground for 'making the familiar strange'.

Mah Rana

Those in the field will have heard the name Mah Rana before. Rana has systematically treated jewellery as a conceptual entity, researching her own family history and investigating the social institutions, rites and rituals that create, and are revealed by, so many forms of adornment. Her ongoing Meanings and Attachments project also collects narrative evidence of the entanglements of jewellery in the form of portrait photographs and stories from her subjects. See this and Jewellery is Life at http://www.mahrana.com/work.htm.

jewellerytalks

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Welcome to jewellerytalks. This is a public space for the collection of personal anecdotes about jewellery and all the weird things it can mean to us.

We want to collect personal stories related to jewellery in any way. Whether you hated a piece given to you as a gift, find war medals inspiring, fiddle flirtatiously with earrings, or harbour a fondness for the sting of the piercing gun, we want to hear from you.

For those who are interested, this site is linked to current research into wearable computing and contemporary craft.

From June till August 2006, we will be looking for willing people to interview, so if you want to tell your story or vent your feelings however vaguely related to the subject of jewellery, email us and we will talk to you.