Chinese Rock Crystal Art Deco Beads

These rock crystal beads are early 20th century. Most of the Chinese beads I have written about were carved in the 18th or 19th century...those beads are carved, pierced and reticulated... spherical... because the necklaces were created with beads from Mandarin Court strings.

This [length] necklace was made for the Western market...the beads are graduated in size from (x to y) a style that became popular c. 1920-1930...  carved with the Shou symbol and another I am not familiar with... pure elegance.

Rock crystal is a member of the quartz family...related to rose quartz, smoky quartz and amethyst. It was used for decorative carving in ancient Egypt and Persia...in the 14th to 17th century it became popular among the European Aristocracy ...it became popular again in the early 20th century when it was used for beads in famous 'pools of light' necklaces.

The simplicity of the carving has a distinctly art deco feel. In 1925, the Exposition of International Decorative Arts and Modern Industry was held in Paris. It was a turning point in the history of modern design in the western world. The 'Art Deco' movement rejected the serpentine lines of Art Noveau and embraced a cleaner more geometric style.

One of the most influential jewelers in Paris at that time was Cartier ...Louis Cartier created some of his most famous Art Deco designs using Chinese carved stones and rock crystal collected on trips to the orient.

Photos of the Cartier Oriental pieces can be seen in the book "Cartier" by Hans Nadelhoffer.

The book is amazing...took my breath away... probably the most beautiful jewelry book I have ever seen... and I have seen many. I own 100's.

Visit PrivateCollection's PictureBook to see additional photos... many in larger formats.

Testing New Photo Bed

I thought it would be nice to put up a recent photo to test the new server ;)

King Fisher Dragon

After spending so much time photographing reflective and often colour morphing jade, it is nice to have a new medium to play with. This is an example of a King Fisher finish...done with powder from the birds feathers...

 

Anniversary Already?

It is hard to believe that an entire year has gone by since the PrivateCollection site was launched! I want to thank all of the readers who have encouraged us to 'keep at it' with their emails and support.

We have posted 26 entries this year and we look forward to posting more entries. Here is a sample of those items. Please visit the PictureBook archive to see all  26 posts and their photos.   

 

Happy New Year!!!

Formatting Possibilities?

Day 2 with Windows Live Writer and I must say that I am happy with all of the flexibility and ease... One of the things which comes up from time to time is wanting to be able to post with a group of photos... this is difficult with the Blogger API, so I thought that I would test that out today using a previous PrivateCollection post.

"Eight years ago this amazing string of carved stone beads appeared in my life to begin my exploration of the world of Chinese personal ornaments...since I had always loved beads it was surprising to find something I had never seen before...and because the first collection that I ever assembled was cameos, I understood something about carving...but not this kind of workmanship..."

There are 42 of the small beads which are 16mm, carved with abstract fish and pierced, with at least 20 holes per bead at a depth of 6-10mm per hole; the large round bead is 38mm carved with abstract animals and the shou symbol for long life and 28 holes to 6mm; the tube bead is 38mm by 15mm with piercing 4mm deep. The beads have been mounted on sterling wire."

Here is the result...

Windows Live Writer

Once again, this post is a test... trying out the new Windows Live Writer to post to Blogger...

I have been with Blogger since the ole Blogspot days before Google bought them out...when the term Blog was a pretty obscure technoid term.

Although we no longer use the BlogSpot domains... and publish directly to sites...that little window, even in the Blogger Beta, is a painful exercise...so we cut and past the HTML into it along with the photo code...and on and on.

So maybe Msoft has it down...it's worth a try. This interface seems nice enough...Now for the test... upload an image...a 936 x 768 JPG and see what the format looks like...

 

This is going to be interesting... here we go!!

 

Update... going to change the format of the picture and do a couple of edits... then republish. That seems to work, now for a custom size and a change in this bold to italic.

DeskTopXampp (DTX) Project

DTX is a new project designed to encourage the use of 'web based' software for desktop applications whether on a main Win32 desktop system or from a removable USB device.

The DTX-controller is the cornerstone of the DeskTopXampp project. It was developed in collaboration with Nat32 and Apache Friends.

The primary feature is the support of 'alternative porting' of both Apache and MySQL servers to avoid conflicts with existing sessions and to allow multiple 'concurrent sessions'. These are important issues for developers as well as the PortableApp's community.