Up-Cycled Vintage Jewelry.... What does this mean exactly?

The term Up-Cycled (Vintage) Jewelry is found in many jewelry stores online. If you go to Etsy.com and type this term in their search engine, you will find many jewelry shops, with handmade jewelry for sale. But what exactly does this mean?

I was fortunate enough to participate in a local fashion photo-shoot, last April. It was low-key local shoot, with the lovely photographer Laura Morales, from Blushing Mulberry Photography in Austin TX. It was there that I met one of the models, Aleta, from Austin Tx. Aleta (aka Stephanie Oliver) came to my house to drop off vintage jewelry in need of repair, and also gave me a pair of vitrail colored, vintage ear-clips, asking me if I could make another jewelry piece with them.

We decided on a bracelet. I truly had no idea how I would do this, but I didn't show this insecurity, I told her I was excited and would make something beautiful. And I did, eventually... I waited until I had the repairs done, as I did not have an idea yet, but it did come to me, as you can see here in the picture below:

©2012 House Of Joris Jewelry, Elvira Bracelet
Up-Cycled Vintage Earrings

This is a great example of 'up-cycled vintage jewelry'. You can see the earrings on this  picture clearly, the 3 prong vitrail navettes, with 3 vitrail chatons, a very common style of earrings in the 1950's. I am sure most of you are familiar with this style of earrings. For this bracelet, I added Swarovski, clear crystal vintage chatons in the middle, as to resemble a flower.

I started with a basic silver, rhodium plated (non-tarnish), clamp bracelet, with a flat base on both sides.  I took the clips off the earrings, and mounted them on these flat bases. The sides of this bracelet, were 2 single wires, about 10mm apart from each other, leading to the flat base. I carefully mounted about a foot of vintage silver Swarovski chain, with tiny clear crystals, on top of these wires, and in between the wires, I added Swarovski tanzanite octagon jewels (10 x 8 mm) in silver setting, as well as Swarovski vitrail vintage, octagon jewels in silver setting (10 x 8 m), and I had beautiful, smaller, vintage Swarovski aqua jewels (8 x 6 mm), and these matched the color scheme of vitrail beautifully, as you can see on this picture:

©2012 House Of Joris Jewelry, Elvira Bracelet
Up-Cycled Vintage Earrings

Alternating these three colors makes the result more interesting, then if I would have chosen just one color. The final step was to bend both sides, so that they would overlap, rather then meet each other exactly.

This bracelet shimmers and shines like no other, it is absolutely gorgeous! Even though the pictures represent this bracelet well, the beauty of it has to be seen in person. I use only Swarovski or the best Czech (vintage) jewels, as the quality can not be matched by any other. The price is definitely higher then other jewels, but they will last a few life-times, without losing any clarity or shine, and there is very little chance you will find scratches or chips off the jewels, even after 75 years!

I am very pleased with the result of this bracelet. The assembly took about 4 to 5 hours of work, labored with LOVE. I can not wait to hear what Aleta thinks of this bracelet, I truly hope she likes it as much as I do. And by sharing this with you, I was able to explain to you exactly what the term 'Up-Cycled Vintage Jewelry' actually means.

I love making custom jewelry. With this post I also want to let you know that I will be happy to take your custom order! Just leave me a comment under this post, and I will contact you asap!