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.