I bought a collection of nine 1950s vintage necklaces and brooches from an eBay seller. Eagerly ripping open the package, I was rather surprised to discover that the pieces weren’t all vintage and, to me, obviously not so.

For your amusement, here’s a game of “New or Old?“

I’m going to show you photos of some jewellery I’ve bought from two eBay sellers plus a necklace from my mother-in-law’s collection that I know for sure to be vintage.

Rhinestone necklaces

Rhinestone is a general term for non-gem stones, often faceted. This could be crystal or glass or lab-created thingies such as diamante.

Fronts:

click for a larger photo

From top to bottom:

1. 6g, bolt-ring clasp
2. 21g, bolt-ring clasp, stones vary from white to yellow
3. 19g, hook only
4. 11g, tarnished bolt-ring clasp, pale rose gold-coloured metal
5. 19g, box clasp
6. 18g, hook and loop
7. 17B, pinch box thing, push-in clasp metal different colour

Backs:

click for a larger photo

Rhinestone brooches

From left to right:

1. 11g, variation in colour of stones
2. 7g

Fronts:

click for a larger photo

Backs:

click for a larger photo

Marcasite brooches

From left to right:

1. 21g
2. 14g
3. 14g

Fronts:

click for a larger photo

Backs:

click for a larger photo

New or Old?

Which do you think is vintage (from the 1960s or earlier), which do you think were made recently? And why? Answers at the end.

Why it matters if it’s just costume jewellery

When buying vintage costume jewellery – which has no intrinsic value – you’re also buying a piece of history. Wearing a 1950s brooch or necklace would have been worn by a woman who’d lived through the second world war.

To buy a piece of jewellery that was sold on the basis of being vintage (specifically 1950s in these cases) only to find out that it was likely mass-produced within the last year or so deprives one of that connection with the past and with a certain quality of craftsmanship.

In these examples, someone has gone to the trouble of getting old rhinestones and clasps and set them into new moulded piece. Someone down the line is then passing them off as vintage. I’d like to know how they enter the market, seeing as some of these turn up at car-boot sales.

How to spot the fakes

True rhinestone jewellery will be at least 40 years old and will look it. If the jewellery looks pristine and brand new, it probably is.

Look closely at the front:

• is there any dirt around the stones?
• has any of the plating worn off?
• are any of the stones missing or damaged?

Look at the back:

• has any plating worn off?
• is it a modern or old-style clasp?
• is the metal textured? jewellery from the 1970s onwards tend to have textured metal

Don’t be fooled by the occasional discoloured stone or old clasps. There’s a lot of broken jewellery out there and these are being harvested for stones and clasps to put into new pieces to pass off as vintage.

Which are new and which are old?

Rhinestone necklaces

1. Fake: clean and pristine – no signs of wear

2. Fake: likely vintage stones in a new setting

3. Fake: new, maybe with an older loop clasp

4. Fake: old clasp on a new (v. light) necklace, odd metal colour

5. Vintage: my mother-in-laws, shows signs of age

6. Vintage: shows signs of age, the plating is worn in places

7. Fake: push-in metal doesn’t match the rest, rhinestones set not to lie completely flat (i.e., to give the idea of warped through age)

The brooches

The first rhinestone brooch is modern but likely uses old stones. The metal is just the wrong colour and texture.

The big marcasite brooch on the left is the vintage one. The back metal is worn and, under a loupe, there’s muck around the stones.

The right-hand leaf brooch has sharp edges, a 100% pristine back and the pin extends beyong the edge.

Why I’m buying old jewellery

In March 2009, I successfully sold my mother- and gran-in-law’s fine and costume jewellery on eBay. As a result, I started to buy vintage jewellery to resell. I have looked at hundreds of jewellery items online every day and bought between one-five pieces a day.

The jewellery rhinestone necklaces and some of the brooches mentioned here came from an eBay seller who regularly goes to car-boot sales and who lists 1950s jewellery almost daily. I chose a few items from three collections she’d listed.

It always comes down to the same thing with eBay sellers in these situations: they’re either ignorant or dishonest, and neither is good.

I keep thinking about a coat that I didn’t win on eBay.

It was second-hand; it wouldn’t have kept me warm, it needed repairs and would likely not have fit me but I still tried to snipe it for £100 even though I need a new mobile and a new camera, not an old coat.

Do you ever see something and think “that is so me – they made it for me”?

As soon as I saw it I knew that I had to have it.

It was described as a 1920s/1930s embroidered coat.

Measurements were given of arms and across the back but I really had no clue what size it was.

Although I’ve lost just over 60 lbs this year, I still have more weight to lose; I’m 5′2″ and didn’t even know if the coat would fit.

But I still wanted it, especially when I saw the close-up photos.

Flowers on black, pinks and blues, embroidery and detail. Heaven!

Also, rose, fuchsias and then I noticed the butterflies!

But there was some damage to the lining.

I also realised that, if it did fit me, I could only ever black with it (or pink or blue). Anything else would look crazy. I decided I could live with this limitation.

The starting price was £80 (about $128). It was a high start price – the seller only sold antiques and had 100% feedback. I figured that they must know the coat’s value.

I set up a snipe for just over £100. I couldn’t really afford this luxury – I really do need a new mobile phone and a new camera – but I wasn’t sure I’d get another chance to own anything like it.

I imagined what the expert would say if this coat appeared on Antiques Roadshow. I couldn’t imagine them valuing it for £100.

Every day, I looked at the listing in my snipe window and mentally gnashed my knuckles. Could I really justify the expense?

I wasn’t at my computer to see the auction end and my automatic bid placed.

The auction got 9 bids by 4 bidders and sold for £139.37. It was more than I would have been willing to pay. I’m glad I didn’t bid more but am sorry that I didn’t get the coat.

Now I just think about it, holding it and reveling in its detailed glory. And back to searching for phones and cameras…

Stephen Fry, talking to Mark Lawson on TV in September 2007 said:

Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have – more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins – is self-pity.

I think self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive.

It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred (and I think that hatred is a subset of self-pity, not the other way around) it destroys everything around it except itself.

Self-pity will destroy relationships; it will destroy anything that’s good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself.

It is so simple to imagine that one is hard done by and that things are unfair and that one is under-appreciated and that if only one had a chance at this or if only one had a chance at that things would have gone better: you would be happier if only this.. that one is unlucky.

All those things. And some of them may well even be true.

But to pity oneself as a result of them, is to do oneself an enormous disservice. [..]

I almost wanted once to publish a self-help book saying “How to be happy” by Stephen Fry.

“Guaranteed success”

And then people would buy this huge book and it’s all blank pages. And the first page would just say:

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself

and you will be happy.

Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings.”

And that’s what the book would be and it would be true. It sounds like “oh, that’s so simple.”

But, of course, it’s not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves.

(Reposted from The Food Confessional.)

I am happy.

I don’t normally think of myself as a happy person but, really, the last few weeks I have been happy about losing weight and, on my weekly weigh-in days, euphoric.

Keeping an online food diary has been a revelation to me. It’s a perfect fit for my personality and losing weight now seems achievable.

My diet

I don’t have a particular diet. All I am doing is keeping within 1,200 calories a day – as advised by my GP – to lose weight.

To do that, I have to know how many calories I have consumed during the day. I slipped into a documenting process unintentionally soon after starting my food diary.

If anyone had told me a few months ago that I’d be counting calories, I’d have laughed at them; I resisted it for years. But it works for me.

What I thought about dieting

Up until I started my food diary, I assumed that I would be miserable on a diet. I even saw psychiatrists and psychologists about it, asking them to help me be happy on a diet or be happy as I was, fat.

I believed that, in order to lose weight, I’d have to be hungry a lot, go without any nice food and be constantly miserable and food-obsessed. The short-term pleasure of eating won out over the long-term imagined pain of dieting, even if it meant putting up with the self-loathing.

Temptation

A few years ago I had an epiphany and realised I couldn’t eat what I wanted when I wanted; my appetite can’t be trusted, either because my brain’s wired wrong or from bad habits.

I now don’t have certain things around if they are likely to tempt me – for example, proper butter or crisps (which I now consider a rare treat).

Shame and self-loathing

For me, ever since I started putting on weight, I felt ‘outside’, not really part of things. I avoid meeting up with old friends because I am embarrassed about how big I got; I feel that I should apologise or warn them in advance – how mad is that!

I resigned myself to the fact that I would never wear nice clothes again. I would love to go swimming or skiing but won’t. Summer is always difficult because I cover up rather than strip down. I sweat at the least bit of exertion; I used to be a competition-level table tennis player and only stopped playing because I was embarrassed at how much I sweated.

And, finally, I felt that I was gonna to die early from a stroke or a heart attack.

And I’m not alone

I’ve been following some of the other food diary bloggers and can totally relate to what they say about how they feel about themselves.

Alice wrote:

I deserve to feel like I am worth something. I deserve to gain my confidence back. I deserve to stop feeling so damn insecure and awful about myself. I hate that I have shut myself from the world. I hate hiding from life.

And:

What floors me is the occasional jolt I’ll get when I suddenly realize, I’ll never be like other women. There are triggers for these breakdowns. Last night was the Oscars and as I watched all those beautiful actresses parade down the red carpet in there high stilleto heels, I suddenly felt very very sad.. sad because I can NEVER wear heels, sad because [...] I feel like I’m missing out on the best years of my life.

This is from a heart-wrenching letter Amanda wrote to herself:

Why do you feel like you are not worth taking care of? Why do you treat your body well one week and then sabotage it all the next? Why do you think you feel so depressed? Have a good look at yourself. You hate yourself at the moment. You feel horrible. You look terrible. You feel like you are drowning in in your own fat. You feel unattractive because all you see when you look in the mirror is a chubby face looking back at you. [...]

[Y]ou are wallowing in self pity, you spend endless hours of thinking about how you want to lose weight but you don’t do anything about it. [..] Stop living in the past and thinking about where you went wrong, live for today, move on and make it right. [...]

Candy does not make you happy, you eat it and you regret it and then you feel like shit and you tell yourself to just eat more. JUST STOP IT!!! Don’t buy the crap in the first place. Don’t binge on stuff just because it is there and just because you feel like you have blown everything so hey it won’t hurt to make yourself even bigger than you are now.

Ending with:

Amanda, you know deep down that you have the potential to be so much more. You are sick of feeling this way, it is so time consuming and depressing, life is too short to be depressed about the way you look, when you have the power to change yourself. Start putting in the time and the energy to reaching your dreams and goals. Stop with all of the self pity and wishing, wishing will get you nowhere. You have to believe in yourself, you have to have faith in yourself, you have to push yourself because no one else will, you have to want to lose weight for yourself and you know you do. How many times do I have to say this to you? JUST DO IT AMANDA. You know you can.

Who’s in control?

It’s not nice feeling at the mercy of temptation, giving food control over my happiness. That I have to put food out of sight or out of reach gives food control.

Sure, dieting has made me think a lot more about food, but I am taking back control.

How I feel now

I feel happy that I am in control of what I am eating. I am happy that I can eat tasty food whenever I am hungry. (The only exception is at night-time. I now often go to bed hungry but I draw pride and strength from that hunger, knowing that I am achieving something.)

I feel happy that I am making progress.

The euphoria I feel when I’ve lost 3-4lbs in a week keeps me going for a couple of days.

I have learnt so much about food by keeping my food diary that I do not think I will put weight on anytime soon. I might maintain my weight but I’d have to make a conscious decision to over-eat to put on weight now.

I feel lighter, more nimble. I don’t get so puffed by walking briskly.

I cannot yet see a difference in my face or body but I do notice a difference in my clothes. Last year, when I put on a lot of weight, I had to stop wearing my normal trousers as they became too tight. I bought elasticated ‘joggers’ (ah, the irony) and wore them to meetings and social events. I can now wear my zipped trousers again (but still wear the joggers at home – so comfy!).

Yes, I still hate the way I look and am embarrassed about being a big blob but I now see it as a transition stage; by the end of the year, I should be near my target weight for the first time in thirty years.

I still have lots of weight to lose but my progress keeps me going.

I know about the brick wall that stops people from committing themselves to a diet. Ya think it’s gonna be a hard lonely slog. And I know it’s easier to stay as one is – even though one despises oneself – than make such a big change.

But I found a way that works for me – I hope that the others do too.

I have an addictive personality (and I am also a completist). I don’t know whether I am hard-wired this way or whether I was dropped on my head when I was a baby. Whichever, it makes for an, umm, interesting life.

My latest addiction is keeping an online food diary. And it’s working; I’m losing weight. Finally, a healthy addiction!

When I find something new that fires up my addiction, I have an intense frenzy of activity.

Here are some of the Internety things I have become addicted to, and in more or less the order they happened:

e-mail: when I met Frank.

Usenet: discussions and socialising.

IRC: chat.

nethack: a terminal-based (text characters) dungeons and dragons game.

sixdegrees.com: chat.

selling on eBay: documenting page hits daily to determine patterns and reviewing number of watchers on an item.

Visit detail: for my company and personal web sites – pages displayed per visit

Flickr: reload the page of recent activity on my photos (I now get this by RSS).

Jyte: I used this continuously for several days and wrote about the experience.

Second Life: chat and making my avatars lovely.

Askville: reviewing answers to my questions (I left after a couple of weeks).

Facebook: reading friend status messages (I now get these by RSS).

Ancestry.com: researching Frank’s family tree over the xmas holiday, once staying up 30 hours.

FoodConfessional: documenting what I eat.

Wordle: reading, categorising and making them | Jul 2008

Oh, and making lists.

• You
• can
• never
• have
• too
• many
• lists

And, because I am a completist, I will be updating this with more things as I remember them.

There’s been a lot of coverage here in England about telephone competition scams. This seems to have envolved in the news to fakery in television: from noddies, storming queens, naming cats, catching fish, and now FEMA staff posing as reporters in America.

It’s all rather silly. But perhaps something good can come out of it.

Growing up is a process of unlearning many of the things that you were taught as child: magic, monsters under the bed, Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, buttercups under the chin and liking butter, that a policeman will look after you, that a doctor will take care of you and that the people in adverts have used and really recommend the products they are advertising.

As adults, there are more things to discover, including how television programmes come about: programmes such as Cash in the Attic are set up in advance, celebrities on TV quizzes see the questions in advance and production companies of reality shows really only want to tell entertaining stories and not document the reality they have captured on film.

But, it occured to me that, if this spotlight on fakery spreads to the government, perhaps there is hope for us in the end.

For ages, politicians have employed all sorts of techniques for persuasion, their words seemingly no longer enough; from the colour of their clothes, whether they wear a jacket or tie, rolled up sleeves, their hand movements or photo shoots of them holding babies, they are all carefully designed to deceive.

Politicians also smear opponents by the simple association of a person’s name with a negative idea. An accusation will be untrue, but being said in the news makes it real. For example “I’m not saying that Bob ever beat his wife but…”. The connection has been made, it will be picked up by the media and the damage is done.

If the government can be scrutinised as much as broadcasters are being now, perhaps it would halt all of their fakery. If not, I fear it will only get worse.

For a long time I avoided RSS. I assumed it was something very technical that I could do without.

Now, I can’t live without it.

My feeds

My first foray into RSS was when I created feeds from my, and my company’s blogs, which I’d built from scratch in 2002.

Entries finish with linked keywords a [find similar] link. I added these at the end of each RSS entry.

At first, I just put the introductions into the RSS feed. But having since subscribed to several feeds myself and realised how annoying it is to have to go to another web site to read the whole post, my blog feeds now contain full posts.

RSS by e-mail

I use FeedBurner for their RSS-to-e-mail service. It means that people can subscribe to an RSS feed and not even know it.

Then it occurred to me that I didn’t have to create an RSS feed of a blog. I could create one for my jewellery shop so that people could find out when I’ve added new items, since most are one-of-a-kind.

The feed includes a thumbnail, the item name, its tags and a [find similar] link (duplicating functionality I added to the web site).

FeedBurner’s e-mail subscription service is perfect for the jewellery shop as it suits jewellery customers; it accounts for 80% of the feed’s subscribers!

The feeds I read

I currently subscribe to 82 (gosh! I just counted them) feeds.

Besides a handful of feeds to work-related blogs, they include my own feeds, several eBay searches, blog comment feeds and Upcoming events.

Most feeds are filed in a folder called play: feeds showing activity on my Flickr photos and my contacts’ photos, craft blogs such as Crafty Daisies, kirin notebook, FlickrBlog and MOO’s two blogs, and blogs by friends.

What is RSS for?

RSS has made it so easy to read things I am interested in that I regularly add feeds.

I don’t have time to check 82 web sites every day (does anyone?) but RSS makes it easy for me to whizz through new content in one convenient place.

Each day, I relish reading the feeds in my play folder so that I can start the day inspired by all the yummy goodness that I can quickly scroll through. I click through to the site if I want to leave a comment.

All these feeds include full posts and all the images.

Pay it forward? Ouch!

When I subscribed to the RSS feed of Richard Bartle – co-creator of MUD – I mailed him when I noticed that the images were missing. Turns out that you have to include the full path to images and he fixed his feed.

And so, yesterday, when I discovered a blog with loads of wonderful design-themed imagery, I mailed them when I found that the images were missing from their RSS feed, thinking it was the same problem regarding links.

The result wasn’t quite what I expected. Here’s what happened next, illustrated by extracts from our mail.

They replied:

my exclusion of images in the feed is actually intentional and, in my view, the feed is meant only to alert people to site updates.

I’ve spent a great deal of time on the design and layout of the blog, so the idea that people might use the feed as a substitute for visiting the actual site isn’t too appealing to me ;)

I said that although design is important, content is more important. I explained how I used design feeds and ended by saying that, with reluctance, I would not be subscribing to her feed.

Their reply, which included two personal insults, went on to say:

We are not paid for the content we post about and we are very much posting for those who want to view our site and not simply the commentary on an image that could easily be viewed on a search engine.

I find it strange that you wouldn’t subscribe to a feed based on the fact that there are no images.

I explained that I meant no offence and continued:

When one subscribes to tens of RSS feeds, an item has to grab you within a few seconds if one’s to read the whole thing. I know that, presented with a screenful of text in a design blog, I’m likely to move on to the next item. I’m only saying this because I don’t believe I am a minority of one and believe you will get a wider audience if you added images to your RSS feed.

They said:

A lot of my business is run under the idea that pleasing the people who love your work is top priority and reaching the general masses by doing something that you’re not comfortable doing for whatever reason isn’t the way I want to go about growing the site.

I replied:

You assume that those who want to have full RSS posts aren’t people who love your work and also aren’t worth catering for.

And, after a final personal insult from them, that was that.

RSS spreads the word

On this issue, Frank says it’s like someone who builds a lovely shop, but who then deliberately impoverishes all other media, tells potential customers “you have to come to the shop if you want to see anything.”

I spent two years designing and building my web site and shop. I’m really proud of it and would love more people to visit it. But, remember my jewellery shop feed? Do you think as many people would click through to the shop if I didn’t include pictures?

If the word is your opinion, your work or another way to show off your expertise, RSS will get it to more people.

If you try to control every aspect of the way your word is presented by crippling your RSS feed, you defeat the object of having a feed at all and can even alienate people.

I went to the one-day conference d.Construct in Brighton, England, which had the theme Experience.

Speakers: Jared Spool, Peter Merholz, Leisa Reichelt, Cameron Moll, George Oates, Denise Wilton, Matt Webb, Tom Coates.

I was disappointed with the morning’s three talks.

Jared Spool’s talk was based on the presumption that most designers have a skill but that they cannot explain why they do what they do.

He described the presentation of a web design by its designer. When questioned about the different elements, the designer could explain his rationale.

Jared was impressed, saying that his company had spent lots of money interviewing 1000s of people. After much work, they had figured out what was important. He wanted to know how this single designer could know what Jared only found out by expensive and time-consuming research. The designer said he didn’t know how he knew.

The implication is that we need to pay for Jared’s research conclusions because most (new, I guess) designers need it to become good designers.

Actually, now that I write this, I still don’t know who’s supposed to benefit from research led by someone who proudly boasts they’ve never designed a web site and that they never intend to.

Let’s replace ‘designer’ with ’software developer’. The suggestion is that people, despite having a relevant degree, can design and build applications but yet not explain what’s good about them or why they made certain decisions.

So, along comes a company that has no development experience to study people using these applications to divine what is good so that they can tell other developers. It’s bonkers.

Jared ended his talk with a card magic trick. If the message was intended to be “it’s all an illusion”, that I can agree with.

During a quick history of the design of various objects such as the film camera and VCR, Peter Merholz’s talk included a diagram of a pyramid: technology at the bottom, features in the middle, and experience at the top, the smallest chunk.

The VCR was given as an example of something that was initially led by technology. Next, companies competed on features. During this period, VCR design neglected the user experience, according to Peter.

I find it hard to believe that a group of people sat around, decided to build a machine, later add loads of features and only then realised, ooh, people can record TV programmes with it.

The Wii, Peter said, was experience-led (a different use of the word ‘experience’) whereas I just see it as a cool controller.

In fact, what Peter wrote in the Adaptive blog about the first VCR, can easily be applied to the Wii:

“[I]n 1976 or so, the first VCRs for home use came on the scene, and that was simply a function of a new technology. The technology allowed you to do something you couldn’t do before, and that was enough.”

There’s a version on his talk in the article Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about.

‘Experience’ seems to be what we used to call user need.

What am I missing?

(By the way, the talks by Cameron Moll, Matt Webb and Tom Coates were
flippin’ excellent.)

(This was originally posted to the misc.misc Wall on Facebook.)

My 7-yr old neighbour just spent some time wandering around our lounge, exploring.

He found the electric floor-sweeper and spent 5 minutes cleaning my floor. We found out that it spits out dirt if it flips upside down but Marcus found a way of twirling the stick as he cleaned it all back up. He asked to have it when I was done with it.

He found Frank’s leather tray for odds-and-ends and asked what it was while he undid and redid the poppers.

I said it was for Frank to chuck in his keys and stuff when he comes home. I explained how he’d take his coat off and throw his keys in, using my keys as an example.

Marcus emptied the tray and, pretending to be Frank, walked past and threw the keys in.

He asked about my key-ring which has a compass. I demonstrated, saying that if someone went walking and got lost, they’d use it to find out where North was and they’d go there.

“Does Frank go north?” asks Marcus.

“Does Frank go north? Let’s ask.” I move to the bottom of the stairs.

“FRANK!” I yell upstairs, “DO YOU GO NORTH?”

(This was originally posted to the misc.misc Wall on Facebook.)

In July, the BBC morning news programme did a short feature on Facebook. A psychologist was concerned that people were spending time in a compelling “virtual world” rather than interacting with people in the “real” world.

Frank taped the segment for me to see how long it’d take before I started shouting at the TV.

I’m sure Facebook had something to do with my getting an invite to a birthday party this summer. I met some smart and funny people, including a young man with whom I had Staffordshire University in common.

I explained that the university was a Polytechnic when I did my Masters there, over twenty years ago. He smiled, looking down at me (literally: he was tall and I am short) and said “you know, I wasn’t born then.”

Lovely.