Aunt Vi
Aunt Vi
She was your favorite aunt.
She smoked long, slender cigarettes when it was still cool, and mailed the most delightful gifts (an antique fountain pen, a miniature bed, a biography of Anne Sexton) for your birthday from her perch in New York. Aunt Violet never married, rode a camel to the pyramids in Cairo, spent a year baking bread in France and once danced with the Grand Duke of Luxembourg at El Morocco. She wore an enormous Mongolian lamb fur hat and had an apartment in the Hotel Des Artistes on 67th Street with bookcases 20 feet tall. An archivist by day and explorer at every other moment, she collected antique perfume bottles and spent the holidays in mountainside Italian village every year. No one asked where the money came from; did it matter? She left you a stuffed bobcat and these earrings, and every time you wear them, you can't help but ache to buy a ticket to somewhere you've never been.
Blush colored freshwater pearls spiral down toward vintage (1960s) glass beads that change color with the light.
With a violet base, they are gold, rainbow, then silver depending upon the swing.
They rest atop of an antique (1900-1920s) violet glass drop with a surface that reveals immediately that these were made carefully and by hand many, many years ago.
Sterling silver chain, wire, oxidized and polished for a gunmetal finish.
$3.00 shipping; US only
(Note: the hand-poured glass drops were found in an attic in Vermont that belonged to married jewelry designers. Can you imagine? The dust was so thick I had to wash these by hand. Old!)