JANE ON HER ORIGINAL PIECE

What is the story of the original piece that motivated this project for you? 

I’ve always loved the story. My parents became engaged just before my father went to World War II in the early 40’s and they were at a local restaurant in North Eastern Connecticut where he proposed to her after dinner in the lounge of this restaurant and she accepted! They must have spoken about a ring and she drew a picture on a cocktail napkin of what she would like. My mother had quite a lot of style. She was an interesting woman and she was able to come up with something like that immediately. She didn’t have to ponder it and she knew what she liked, so she drew a picture and said she wanted four garnets of some size – she probably knew they would be inexpensive stones which would be good for him because he didn’t have any money – with some little diamond chips in between them. So he took this cocktail napkin to a small jeweler in Norwich, Connecticut. The jeweler created this ring for which my mother told me many years ago, they paid $80 and it was 14 karat gold and a simple bezel with little diamond chips in between the four stones. 

So I wore it, not always, but interestingly, I always wore it at times - I ultimately became a library media specialist, I didn’t work while raising my children but then I went back and became a library media specialist and whenever I had to do anything taxing, make a presentation or present to the school board or do something special, I would always wear this ring because I felt that it gave me extra strength or something from my mother who I adored. She died the same year she gave me the ring which made it more special. Subsequently, we had a theft in our home and I lost many many many things, many pieces of jewelry and silver, household silver and I didn’t feel upset about the loss except for the garnet ring. It wasn’t a valuable ring but it was so special, and ever since that time, ten or twelve years ago, my husband always said why don’t you find something else that reminds you of that, suggests that or something. I started following you guys during COVID, [which] was like my salvation. I loved all your posts and I followed you guys and I thought Aha! I can do this, I can do something different.

The thing that I absolutely love about it is, it’s so different from anything I’ve ever owned. I’ve always had such traditional, linear, balanced, symmetry – even in the things that I’ve inherited, they were all symmetrical and this is so crazy.