With Valentine's Day approaching, I've spent the last week working on making jewellery with hearts of various shapes and sizes. As I sat at the bench I started to wonder about the heart shape's popularity as a symbol to represent love.
How long has this heart symbol that we know and use all the time in messages and texts (...or maybe that's just me...) been around? What were it's origins? This is what I found out........
The earliest known depiction of a heart shape as we know it, is a heart shaped silver pendant from the Bronze Age! This possibly represented the heart shaped leaf of the peepal tree which has a lot of medicinal uses including for treating sexual dysfunction. (Read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_symbol )
By 600BC the heart shape was found on silver coins (as seen below) and related to the, at the time, very expensive plant Silphium which had heart shaped seedpods and was used widely as an early contraceptive.
It wasn't until the Medieval period that love as well as sex was linked to the heart shape with images of people offering a stylised heart to a lover......although throughout this period and until the end of the 14th century it was apparently commonly depicted with the point upwards!
I find these early links between the heart shape and silver so interesting and satisfying as a jeweller!
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So in the spirit of the Bronze Age silver pendant, here’s a piece that I’ve been working on this week.
First I cut a heart out of 1cm thick MDF using a small bandsaw to make a mould.
Using my trusty flypress (pictured below), layers of neoprene and rubber, and the mould that I'd made, I pressed a domed heart out of sheet silver and cut it out.
Next I silver-soldered an oval jump ring on to it to form the bail.
Finally, I wanted to add some texture to the surface so I chose a coarse grinding tool (the pink thing) to use in my pendant motor and applied the texture by making tiny swirl patterns on the surface over and over again.
I'm thinking of putting it on a silver chain though instead of the black leather, what do you think?
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So while busy with a head and hands full of hearts, I also managed to catch Bob Mortimer (of Vic and Bob fame) on Desert Island discs this week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00029fv I found it really moving, worth a listen......other than that I listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega, an old favourite of mine..... I love to have music on while I'm in the workshop.
Happy Valentine's Day....
Thanks for reading x
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