One Thing Leads To Another

Looking for work in Newport in 1972 led to…
a job polishing in a silver plating shop which led to…
learning how to repair silver hollowware which led to…
gaining a love of the craft which led to…
a decision to make the craft my life which led to…
learning lost wax casting which led to…
a low cost way to make my designs which led to…
creating a line of jewelry and buckles which led to…
selling them to stores which led to…
selling and designing for Cartier in NYC which led to…
meeting the owner of Trafalgar Ltd which led to…
a salaried job designing for Trafalgar which led to…
enough money to buy a new house which led to…
a new workshop which led to…
a mail order business in the house which led to…
successful ads in New Yorker which led to…
growing demand for our designs which led to…
an bigger workshop out of the house which led to…
a full time staff and a retail store in Newport, RI.

More to come. What's next?

So You Want To be An Artist (Part 2)

When I reached my early 30’s I began realize that I could not keep up the pace of my first years as a metal smith and I needed to come up with a plan to end the cycle of boom and bust. Boom when I finally sold a piece of silverware and bust during the long intervals between sales. Lets face it, being a "starving artist" is OK for only so long…pretty soon it gets to be a bit of a bore. I believe that almost all artists hit this realization at some point, but continuing the essence of their creative drive while securing stable income is quite a trick.

Actually it isn’t a trick at all; it is an absolute necessity and necessity is the mother of invention..

So You want To Be an Artist (Part 3)

One of the few things I had made, almost from the beginning, that were regular sellers, were hand made belt buckles. Most were made using a decorative technique called “repoussee” which creates a relief design on the surface of the silver using punches and small chisels called “tracers”. One sees this kind of decoration on old tea pots and bowls. I used it to create one of kind buckles featuring whales, sailing ships and other somewhat more whimsical designs.

Customers could have a one of a kind buckle made using a design which I drew for them and featured any animal or theme they wanted. These buckles could take as long as 3-4 days to complete and I usually sold them for around $100. Ha! At that price one can see why they were good sellers.

It wasn't long before I learned about rubber molding and lost wax casting. This was a process where I could make inexpensive copies of some of my most popular buckle designs and offer them for a lot less money than the "one off" versions. I started with half a dozen buckles and with the rubber modls could make copies which I offered in brass and sterling silver. At the time I was working out of a shop on the waterfront in Newport and the season for tourists was pretty short. I had to figure out a way to sell more buckles all the year around

Enter Joe Kadison, an independant sales represetative who carried a line of clothing, nautical gear and accessories and sold them to stores all over the eastern seaborad. He loved my buckles and he convinced me that he could sell them to some of his accounts. I agreed to give it a try and before long I found myself selling to stores from Maryland to Maine.>

So You want to be an Artist (Part 1)

The Artist As A Young Man.

In 1972, when I started working in silver, I tried to make all of my designs one of a kind works of art; masterpieces of the silversmith's craft. I carefully honed my skills, expanded my repertoire and more or less went on a metal smithing binge; working 50, 60 hours a week in my workshop. I was trying everything. Spoons, boxes, wine goblets, belt buckles, plates, trays and eventually a tea service. There didn't seem to be anything I couldn't do if I set my mind to it. I was 24. I I was single. t was Newport. It was GREAT!

But after several years of this creative blitz, I came to the realization that I might go broke trying to sell my "one of a kinds". Frankly, few people wanted to spend thousands, much less hundreds of dollars on handmade silverware (my first love). I wanted it to be the 18th century, when one's personal wealth was measured by the value of his "plate" or silverware not by their "life style". But when my 30's loomed I started to reconfigure my life plan.....and my creative parameters.

Surprising Designs Part Two

There are a lot of designs we create which fail utterly to ring anyone's bell. A good example of this was the replica pin of a 1953 Buick Roadmaster grill. This was to be the kick-off piece in a whole series of jewelry designs based on the golden age of US automobile manufacturing. Remember them? They were made in a place called "Detroit" and some of the bumper and grill designs were reallly sculpture in an industrial arts kind of way. At anyrate, I had envisioned a whole series of replica jewelry from this "golden age".

But it certainly didn't inspire our customers. I think we sold about a dozen over the course of a year and finally retired the piece. In all truth the piece was too heavy and too large to worn comfortably. I remember Joan (my wife and business partner) wearing the pin out to lunch one day and our waitress asked if it was one of those "old fashioned radios" Well, kind of. I had hoped that "art" would carry the day, but like my friend Jeff Deegan used to say "Art is Long, Life is Short".

There it is.

Surprising Designs

We have finally completed the first production run of our new designs for the coming Holidays. Coming up with new pieces is the really fun part of working in metals and selling with catalog and website. We do it at least twice a year and our customers reactions to the pieces is always "interestin"g.


Sometimes a new piece gets a surprisingly good reception and sometimes quite the opposite takes place. Many, many years ago I designed and made a Broccoli Pin which interested me because of the challange of creating a realistic texture and proportion. I wasn't expecting much just thought it was going to be "fun". We put it in our then fledgling catalog and ran an ad in "The New Yorker" magazine. The pin was an unblieveable hit. At one point it was mentioned in a Times editorial, a "Gifts for Gardeners" news section and finally wound up on display at the National Archive in Washington D.C.! Who knew?

Next Post: Designs we'll call "What was I thinking"?.

My Hallmark

My trademark has been registered with the US Patent Office since 1973. Since my early enthusiasm was strictly for large silver objects such as goblets, boxes and tea services I though it would be a good idea to mark any piece I made with a stamp which could be traced in later years back to a little known silversmith working in Newport RI. I had visions of grandeur beyond belief.

Its kind of a funny looking thing, sort of looks like a curvilinear stick figure with horned head. It evolved directly from my candle making days, yes I said "candle making". The mark is a combination of my atrological sign (did I say I started in the 70's?), Aries, and the chinese symbol (found on a calendar from a local take out shop) for the first day of April (born a fool). These two elements came together in my kitchen as I tried to design a mark for the candles I was making for the local head/craft shops. I had no work so I was making psychedleic candles in my apartment and I though it would be extremely cool, far out, groovy, etc. to have a stamp I could press into the botttom of my candles to identify them as the genuine article, what ever that might be.

The candel venture was was not particularly lucrative and soon after I began working in sterling silver so it was natural that I use this mark as my silversmithing trademark. When I started designing and making jewelry, the mark was used for the smaller articles as well.

What is Sterling Silver?

A lot of people have no idea what sterling silver is. Many times I have had customers ask me if sterling is solid silver or is it plated. The answer is pretty simple: sterling silver is any alloy of pure silver which is at least 925 parts per thousand of pure silver. Traditional sterling is compsed of pure silver and a bit of copper. The copper is added to the pure metal to halp make the products made of sterling to be stronger and less subject to wear. Pure silver is relatively soft and stays that way. For instance a spoon made of pure silver would be the wrong thing to eat hard ice cream with as it it would bend like crazy. With the copper addedto the material the spoon, while still somewhat soft, compared to steel, would be a whole lot stiffer than the pure silver version.

The sterling alloy is the same color throughout as the added copper mixes with the silver and is not visible once alloyed. The copper does show up on the surface of sterling, however, if the alloy is heated and the copper combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to form a layer of copper oxide. This oxide appears as a dirty, brownish smudge on the surface of sterling pieces as they are worked and heated either to anneal them orto solder them. Metalsmiths call this discoloration "Fire Scale" and it is the bane of silversmiths everywhere as it cannot be easily removed but must be either polished off with abrasives or plated over with a thin layers of pure silver. The latter was used laregly by sterling manufacturers in order to save polishing time in the silver shop.

Enough on this subject for now. More "lore" on a later post.

The charm of charms

This past spring we started a program to offer many of our designs as charms. We always had a certain number of charms available but we pretty much had them limited to specific choices such as snowflakes or beachcomber items. With this new program, we are working to expand the pieces available to cover a much broader spectrum of sentiments from wishbones to bird's nests.



At the moment we are working on our 2009 Holiday offering which will come out in early November. Some of the pieces our customers may find omterestomg are the new 2009 snowflake ornament, an origami style five pointed star pin, rock weed (sea weed) pendant and several new styles of earring.



We will definitely have an early release of our new designs before the catalog arrives in homes, so be looking for emails from us with preview offers on our new designs. So far these offers, sometimes free shipping, sometimes good iscounts, have met with wonderful response from our customers. Thank You All!



Jim Breakell

Holiday Designs are In The Works

Welcome to our (my) first blog posting. If you are not familiar with my company, JH Breakell please visit our website at www.breakell.com as a way of learning about us. We are a small metalsmithing company in Newport RI, now in our 38th year and enjoying designing and making jewelry and accessies in sterling silver and 14 karat gold.

September is a great time in New England; the weather is usually spectacular, a lot of tourists have packed up and headed home, and we are busy creating the new jewelry designs we want to offer for the Christmas/Holiday season. New designs will be posted to our website, www.breakell.com, before our catalog arrives in homes, so our internet customers get a first look at what we have created for the Holiday.

This fall we have some new designs with marine or nautical themes (duh) as well as new pieces from contributing metalsmiths and designers from the Newport RI area. Of course the new snowflake ornament and accompanying jewelry has been released and can be found in the "Snowflake" area of our website. This year's design, and we design a new snowflake every year, is based on the Poinsettia. The early response to this piece as been wonderful and you should check it out on our website, where you can also all of the other designs covering the past 8 year's collection.

Since this is my first posting I am going to leave it at this point and check to see how the whole thing looks. I will try and reply as quickly as possible to any inquiries or comments. Thanks.