Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 and, less than ten years later, Fatih Mehmet ordered the construction of the Topkapi Sarayi Palace overlooking the Bosphorus. It remained the seat of the Ottoman Sultans until 1853. The ring designs Topkapi One and Topkapi Two were inspired by the Ottoman treasures.
There are peacocks everywhere in India: decorating palaces in niches, as carriages, and in wall paintings.
Fresh from my recent trip to India, I spent an afternoon in the V&A museum's Indian galleries, and there, in a small cabinet on the side, was a gold necklace. Unusually the necklace was threaded on a heavy black cord, almost a rope. Along its length, evenly spaced, were golden amulets with wonderfully deeply-engraved textures and all of them with differing outlines. As I read about it from the notes inside the cabinet, I learnt that it had come from southern India - as part of a dowry. The gold pendants, I realised, represented seed pods.
Behind the closed doors of the city of Pisa lie untold treasures, and the key to unlock many of them was held by 'Zio Francesco'.
If you were born and bred in Rio de Janeiro, you are a Carioca. This cuff with its abacus of pearls moving up and down on the bars tells of the original way of counting in Rio by the traders and in the markets, so I called it Carioca.
Cassandra's quote pendants began when her cousin Matilda Goad asked her to engrave some words from her grandmother that she wanted to keep with her always. Not wanting the words to be easily readable by others, Cassandra created a pendant shaped like a worn and treasured Roman coin with its uneven outline and surface. She then engraved it with the words in a spiral, like the French arrondissements or an 'en colimacon' staircase, often looping the serifs of the letters from one line to the next.
