Do you know how to put a ring brooch on? These brooches, which were ubiquitous throughout the High Middle Ages, are beautiful and easy to wear, once you’ve learned the trick. Here we go, in three easy steps:
Pull a pinch of fabric up through the ring from the back. Pierce the fabric, and let it slide along the pin.
Let the fabric smooth out and fill the inside of the ring brooch.
And remember to check out our selection of ring brooches!
Now that we have modernized Billy & Charlie’s online presence, we may occasionally be inspired to share updates with our fans. This may include Tech Treats, occasional sales, or product announcements.
Please let us know what you would like to hear about! (This is a service still in development, so don’t expect many emails from us.)
We got an inquiry from a fellow pewterer about how the stones are held into the comets, and how we recognized that the casting includes clips that are pressed back to hold them in place. Here are some shots of the comet brooch mold, the castings, and the photos we worked from of the medieval originals that helps answer those questions. We didn’t have a casting that had not been clipped and cleaned to hand when we got this inquiry, so you must imagine the sprue and gates are still present. The mold is made in three parts: one for the front and two back pieces that contain the sprue (casting gate) and also create the pin.
The raised area in the back pieces.
The front piece of the mold casts the round setting for the stone and the high part of the back pieces makes the opening in the setting where ti rises to touch the front.
A casting with the clips folded back to retain the stone.
Images of originals – the green arrows point to the places where the clips emerge and are folded back.
Drawings of original brooches that cast incompletely, and were never pressed into service. The green arrows point to unfolded clips.
Although it has only three pieces, the comet brooch mold casts a pretty complex piece.
You, perhaps, are beginning to think of Pennsic. We are too! Mac began casting stock in earnest on Sunday, and today he took advantage of nice weather to reclaim (outdoors) usable pewter from the dross we skim off the pot as we cast. That’s 10 pounds, 15 ounces of good pewter. There were also 2 pounds of unusable dust and crud. This leads to the interesting observation that nearly 85% of the dross we have to clear to cast conveniently is actually usable pewter. Although we are careful about where we put our skimmings when we cast a different alloy or pure tin, we routinely use the reclaimed metal in heavy, thick pieces where tiny variations in the resulting alloy cannot cause any trouble. Most of this is scheduled to be turned into our larger buckle frames.
You
probably remember that we are always citing Heilig en Profaan 1 – or 2 –
or 3 – when we talk about the amazing original material from the
Netherlands. We are very excited to have received our copy of Heilig en
Profaan 4, with 800 newly published objects (a few are mold mates of
objects published before, but they often provide additional
information). We have already picked three new objects to copy – and have several others under consideration.
To read more about this excellent book and order one for yourself
(although the shipping charges make it worthwhile to order 3 if your
friends are also interested, because it costs 38 euro to ship one, but
only 40 to ship three to the US), see http://www.medievalbadges.org/mb_publicaties_UK.html). The price is currently 42.50 euro. It goes up to 49.94 euro after Jan. 15.
