Collection Of Pins with Pipe For Scale, 1500s-1800s | There is something meditative about picking these tiny slivers from the mud. I have over 10,000 pins, but there are millions on the foreshore – washed down drains, dropped from dresses - and dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Six hundred years ago, pins were a high value item on sale only two days a year. (They kept our ancestors together, pleating their ruffs and pinning their bodices.) I find it poignant that nowadays the only use I have for them is to prise splinters from my children’s feet.
18th Century Georgian Brooch | I found this beautifully worked Georgian mother of pearl brooch lying on the pebbles on the returning tide. It seemed impossibly delicate: a few waves more and the shell would have cracked. I don’t know what the centre once held: perhaps it was a carving, or maybe it was used as a base to add depth to a portrait or glass jewel.
Gold Swastika, 1910 | I had a bewildered moment thinking this was fascist table-scatter, before realising it was 9k gold. This swastika was made in 1910 by Charles Horner of Chester, and is probably part of a hat pin. At the time the swastika had not yet been appropriated by the Nazis and instead symbolised Good Luck. I picked this up amidst 1940s debris, so perhaps the owner threw it out during WW2.
Seal Matrix 17th Century | I picked this up one Sunday morning with the bells of St Paul’s pealing around me, close to four hundred years after it had been dropped on the foreshore. I suspect this copper seal matrix, with its trefoil design and a simple imprint of a bird carrying a branch in its beak, was mass produced and owned by a middling sort – perhaps a shop owner who used it to secure demands for overdue payment.
Anna's Finds
Collection Of Pins with Pipe For Scale, 1500s-1800s | There is something meditative about picking these tiny slivers from the mud. I have over 10,000 pins, but there are millions on the foreshore – washed down drains, dropped from dresses - and dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Six hundred years ago, pins were a high value item on sale only two days a year. (They kept our ancestors together, pleating their ruffs and pinning their bodices.) I find it poignant that nowadays the only use I have for them is to prise splinters from my children’s feet.
18th Century Georgian Brooch | I found this beautifully worked Georgian mother of pearl brooch lying on the pebbles on the returning tide. It seemed impossibly delicate: a few waves more and the shell would have cracked. I don’t know what the centre once held: perhaps it was a carving, or maybe it was used as a base to add depth to a portrait or glass jewel.
Gold Swastika, 1910 | I had a bewildered moment thinking this was fascist table-scatter, before realising it was 9k gold. This swastika was made in 1910 by Charles Horner of Chester, and is probably part of a hat pin. At the time the swastika had not yet been appropriated by the Nazis and instead symbolised Good Luck. I picked this up amidst 1940s debris, so perhaps the owner threw it out during WW2.
Seal Matrix 17th Century | I picked this up one Sunday morning with the bells of St Paul’s pealing around me, close to four hundred years after it had been dropped on the foreshore. I suspect this copper seal matrix, with its trefoil design and a simple imprint of a bird carrying a branch in its beak, was mass produced and owned by a middling sort – perhaps a shop owner who used it to secure demands for overdue payment.
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