I have always been interested in fossils and rocks. I was thrilled to learn that an agate is an opal only many millions of years older. Opals are formed from teeth, shells and bones amongst other things.

There were in Bloomington, Indiana where my daughter went to undergrad, these wonderful women who also had a love of rocks and fossils and would make sterling silver jewelry out of them. After many years of wearing them, I thought to display them on covers of scrapbooks. 

I use some extremely wonderful leathers from Italy for the covers also. They can be found at www.italianskins.com of course. They are easy to work with and are quite lovely people.

It gets really discouraging to blog when you don't even know who comes to see or read the blog. Most frustrating is no comments. One day, maybe.

Everyone has favorite stones and they are also a memory. One of the many summer trips we did as a family is go to Spruce Pine, North Carolina where we mined for Aquamarine.

The stones came back, cut and very beautiful..The garnets there are the color of a beautiful ruby. An interest in rocks is a lifetime of learning. I find that rock conventions have some lovely cabachons in the most beautiful variety of stones to add to scrapbooks. Labradorite is like a peacock feather when cut that way. At times the collage on the cover needs a box to protect them. 

This is a wonderful way of collecting those memories you choose to preserve. I have some photos from my  own family that are tin types! I can hardly believe this but so many old images of my ancestors are a delight to have. Lately I have taken a candy box and made the scrapbook to fit inside. 

Thank you for visiting and by all means leave a comment. I suppose this may invite criticism as well as the lovely compliments that many choose to say instead.

This scrapbook has pearlized Italian leather. The enamel is antique and the feather is carved mother of pearl. There is also carved coral and enamel buttons. I also used a real freshwater pearl and cut a portion of a wedding invitation for some texture differences.

There are vintage pins from Spain that had fake pearls on damascene. I pulled the fake pearls off and used real South Sea Pearls on them. Damascene is a very hot and difficult process and to put a fake pearl on the end result, is not really appreciative of the difficulty of the work. It is  in Japan, called Niello. I am not sure why Spain and Japan are the only ones who are well known for this kind of work. It is how armor and swords were manufactured in the past. I have always found it very beautiful. So often people who made the journey to Spain got a piece of this work in the form of jewelry. Toledo Spain is the most famous for this work. 

This is a scrapbook of phases of my life and because the collage on the front grew in height, it became necessary to have a box to protect the album. One phase of my life was in Toledo, Ohio.

The other silver pin in this old jewelry collage is called spun silver and the area of Spain famous for this kind of work is Cordoba, Spain. Here people are as short as they are in the Phillipines. I am 5'2" and usually having lived in Minnesota, I have had to look up and my neck over the years has noticed. Here I looked straight on or down at people. This was quite something for me.