New work in genuine jet, mourning jewelry, a new story...

Good Mourning Folks,

It's been quite awhile since I wrote about my work with jet and making mourning jewelry. If you check my old thread you can see all the information that I've posted before. I'm still working quite a bit of jet and I gave a lecture last month for the Portland Bead Society about the history of jet and my work with jet. It went over really well and I'm tentatively schedule to give the jet lecture again for the San Diego Bead Society in January of next year!

I learned even more about jet while preparing for my powerpoint lecture for PBS. Most people are familiar with jet's historic uses in Victorian times as traditional mourning jewelry to help women deal with their bereavement, and as one of the only true, naturally black, organic accessories available to go with a widow's weeds. Dealing with my own grief from loss of family and the ravages of surviving 30 years of the AIDS epidemic is one of the things that has pushed me, and keeps pushing me, to work with this unusual organic gemstone. Of course a lot of people think that because jet is black and it was used in Victorian mourning jewelry that it has ALWAYS been associated with death. I was happy to discover that is just not true!

In my research I found out that the cult of the Phrygian Earth goddess Cybele, the "Great Mother" of the ancient gods and goddesses, has an association with jet! Her cult spread from northern Turkey to Greece and then throughout the Roman empire. She was known as the "black stone", or the black faced goddess, because the most famous statue of her had a black meteorite for it's face! (unknown whether it was just a rough black meteorite or if it naturally formed to look like a face or if it had been sculpted to look like a face). To honor her, the priests in her cult wore jet beads! Here's a link to an article in the BBC about the archeological dig where they found this Roman transvestite eunuch priest decked out in jet beads! I still haven't been able to find pictures of THOSE actual beads, in spite of having directly contacted the guy who did this dig.

So I continue to work in jet and explore it's deep history. The earliest jet beads discovered were in an archeological dig in northern Spain and date from 17,000 BCE!. Here's some pics of my current work in jet....

Most everything I take to a high polish but some of them I've been leaving matte finish. My friend in Scotland and I have been collaborating more and here are some necklaces she's strung with some of my jet focal beads... This one has what I call "ash blonde" tigereye beads in it (like much tigereye, I imagine these were color treated with heat or bleaching)

and here are two more necklaces made with jet focals and white magnesite beads. I suspect that the white magnesite, which was sold as "white turquoise" (NO such thing), is reconstituted (certainly the spikes are) but it definitely goes well with the jet focals and jet spacers!

That's all for now! I just wanted to get "back in black" and tell y'all a NEW story about the history of jet! Thanks for letting me share and feel free to check out my DVHdesigns eBay store if you would like to see more of my work!