The Woman in the Yellow Dress- Jewelry

The main dress post can be found here and the headwear can be found here.

The Jewelry

While I was working on the saya, I actually used the pieces of jewelry to break up the monotony of the project. It gave me a sense of accomplishment since I was still working on the project as a whole, but also a break from the saya itself.

Our lady and her bling

This outfit has three pieces of jewelry: the headpiece and two necklaces. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a jeweler and after this, I don’t think I have much of a future in that realm. These pieces were incredibly fiddly. I even had one catastrophic failure of the headpiece and had to disassemble and redo it. But I made it through. A link to the gallery of all my photos of these pieces can be found here.

The completed pearl choker.

The first item in this series I made was the pearl choker. In the painting, all you can see is what appears to be round links of gold. There is a definite reflective quality to them though that to me implies a rounded shape and potentially pearls. Because I am no metalworker nor did I have that in my budget, all of these pieces are largely constrained in their accuracy by the materials I was able to find. I did not do a deep dive on jewelry setting for these pieces at all. That said, I thankfully managed to find some ouches that fit this bill quite nicely. I picked up 18 of these costume ouches from Truly Hats, and I’m quite happy with them. I attached the ouches to each other with small jump rings I acquired off Amazon and then to a a toggle clasp also from Amazon. These proved an interesting challenge. The ouches themselves are sort of round but also sort of pentagonal. Linking them up in a smooth way that looks like it sits properly on my neck took some time and several reworks. Once I figured out a system though, this piece quickly became a favorite. It is understated and very comfortable to wear. It is noticeably larger than the depicted piece. If I were to revisit this piece, I would probably use something a little smaller.

The next piece I made was the headpiece. Deciding how I was going to do this took more time than expected. On one hand, the piece itself looks to be a series of metal plates. It’s gold, like the rest of the jewelry, which matches the dress nicely. However, I wasn’t sure how gold would work with this dress. Ultimately, I decided silver colored might be a better call with my now much cooler outfit. I’m not entirely convinced I was right about this, but more on that later.

For this piece, I wanted something that would stand out. I found some oval labradorite stones on Amazon and some beautiful oval bezels for them to go in and fell in love. Deciding how to mount all of this was the next big challenge. I could either have it be a stand-alone piece of jewelry that attached to itself, or I could mount it on a ribbon. I decided on the latter, because my understanding of jewels like this is that collections of ouches were often mounted on ribbons so that they could be used on a variety of outfits over time. Luckily, Truly Hats also had something that would suffice as the spacers, and I picked up these spacers at the same time I did the pearl choker pieces. Lastly, I bought a white silk ribbon on which to mount the items.

The original headpiece, post completion.

The stones and bezels arrived and with them arrived my next decision: do I keep the loops on the ends of the bezels, or do I choose to remove them? After gluing on the stones and testing a couple of options, I decided to remove the loops. This meant one thing that most people who know me know is also not a great idea- power tools. Evan has a dremel tool that he uses to clean up the models he paints. This tool also came with grinding wheels and sand paper, both of which were adequate to my needs. It took about 2 hours of time to do all 20 of these because the tool kept heating up but in the end it was definitely worth it.

I then sewed the bezels and spacers to the first ribbon (the silk ribbon) and thought I was done! It looked beautiful! It stayed where it should! It could be pinned to a cofia underneath quite easily! Success all around!

Wrong.

This silk ribbon, while beautiful, was no match for the combined weight of the stones, bezels, and spacers, and ultimately tore at pretty much every connection point. I debated reinforcing it by sewing a backing onto the silk, but ultimately decided the ribbon was too far gone for this to be successful. And so, I tore the thing apart. But it wouldn’t be an A&S project if I didn’t have to completely reconsider at least one element, now would it?

Thankfully, I had a stash of some wider black ribbon that I have previously used to wrap tranzados with. Ultimately, even though it lacked the full height of the bezel pieces, I decided this was the sturdiest option moving forward. Additionally, for an extra point of reinforcement, I decided to use embroidery thread to thread the bezels and spaces together so that their full weight would not be solely on the ribbon underneath, but also on each other. I think this was the right call and am very happy with the resultant piece. It can still be pinned to the cofia underneath and can also be used to help anchor the tranzado.

The final, completed headpiece.

I’m not, however, done with this headpiece. I think a gold option should honestly be considered. The headpiece in the painting features what appears to be both open loops of gold between the rectangular connectors as well as gold plates somehow attached to them. While no ribbon is evident, it is still possible one was used, though less likely with the open plates. Another alternative is that the plates that appear to be open are actually a clear or very light colored stone reflecting the light. It’s very possible that given her other jewelry, they’re more pearl or mother of pearl or maybe even a shell of some sort. I do have a concept plan for a further piece that explore these options.

My Saint Lawrence pendant

The last item of jewelry is a gold rectangular pendant on a thin dark ribbon. Because of the scene and the simplicity of this piece, it is reasonable to suppose that she is wearing some sort of iconography. Depictions of religious figures was quite common at the time in jewelry, (see my piece on my paternoster for some more detail) and while often this would be the Virgin Mary, many saints also featured in such jewelry. I wanted to choose something meaningful to me here. I am Jewish, so most saints and the like mean very little or would feel disrespectful to wear. However, my SCA household is the Free Company of Saint Lawrence, Debauched, and because of this connection, Saint Lawrence felt like the right choice here. I say more on this piece in a previous blog post (linked here) but have a picture anyway.

This pendant was strung on some remaining velvet ribbon from the earlier embroidery and completed with one of the same toggle clasps as the choker.

I did have some remaining spacers and cabochons after all this was complete and those became some bracelets and I have two left over that I hope to someday either make into rings or earrings to match this outfit.