Towards the end of summer my customer came to see me about possibly incorporating some baby hair into a ring for his wife. I knew immediately the jeweller I wanted to use for this interesting commission as her work is incredible.
Helen's silver work previously at Heart Gallery has included this Easy Tiger necklace. Helen sets miniature models in resin and incorporates them in handcrafted silver jewellery.
Helen spends hours dreaming up little resin scenarios to preserve these highly detailed finely crafted figures in desirable and wearable handcrafted jewellery pieces. The simplicity of the designs belies the hours needed to create the collection but to see a piece come to life at the final resin polish is a revelation every time!
It was for this reason I chose Helen to do this amazing but extremely sensitive commission. My customer and his wife had unfortunately lost their daughter and they had cut some of her hair and taped it into a memory book. He thought that trying to place some of this hair into a piece of jewellery for his wife to wear would be a good way to preserve their daughter's hair should anything ever happen to the memory book. So he secretly removed the very small lock of baby hair from their memory book to bring in to me, a ring of his wife's to take a size from and an idea of how he wanted the finished piece to look and so the design process began.
Helen and I were under pressure as there was a timescale to finish it in and he didn't want all the hair set in resin so that he could put some back in their memory book. I think this was an important thing to do so that the hair could still be touched should they feel the need to.
Helen finished it with only 5 days to spare before my customer was doing a charity bike ride over to Paris. His wife was then flying out to meet him on their Wedding Anniversary where he was going to take her up the Eiffel Tower and present her with the ring! When he came to Heart Gallery to collect it there were hugs and tears all round and I felt so proud that he had trusted myself and Helen to take his thoughts and ideas and turn them into a reality.
What isn't visible here is that inscribed on the inside rim of the silver, with the hair, is their daughter's name. The baby hair and Hannah May are one, encapsulated together to be worn by mummy.
What is also really lovely about this ring is that no-one looking at it knows that it contains baby hair; this is something personal to my customers and they alone can choose to tell the viewer or not.
My customer and his wife will soon be back from their holiday in France so I am looking forward to meeting them together at Heart Gallery when she feels the time is right to show me.
I want to thank my customer from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to share this story with you.
The picture below is another recent commission Helen completed for customers that I want to share with you proving that romance is not dead! Wedding rings - the inlaid resin has fragments of sea glass, sand, shells and stones from the beach that they first met on...
