Family Treasures

 My mother loved jewelry, I can remember whenever she went out of the house she had on two things, lipstick and some sort of jewelry.  She would always take her rings and other jewelry off the minute she got home, but she never left the house to go anywhere without some on.

She came from a long line of jewelry lovers actually.  Even the men on my maternal grandmother's side were fond of the sparkly baubles.  One of my great uncles even had a man's ring with a 3 & 3/4 carat diamond solitaire surrounded by 72 smaller diamonds!  My grandmother bought that ring after her brother died and had it made into several other pieces of jewelry.

After my mother died, my sisters and I went through the various boxes of jewelry she had stashed away in what seemed like ever drawer of her dresser.  We laughed so hard that day - it was all we could do to not wet our pants.  My mother had so many pins that it became like a game of Go Fish, where one of us would say "who has a butterfly already, or a bunny?!" and we finally got to the point where we were saying, "no I don't want another daggum flower pin, you take it!"

There were also a lot of very sentimental pieces that we remembered our maternal grandmother wearing when she was all dressed up for church on Sunday, complete with white gloves and a beautiful hat.  As an only child, my mother inherited all of her mother's jewelry and then let us play dress up with it as children.  So many of the pieces were missing rhinestones or pearls, but we still wanted them just the same.

My poor sister "M" ended up picking things she loved, only to turn around and find yet another stone missing.  She declared that she had picked all of the "bad" pieces since hers were so delicate that even moving them a little made things shift and fall off.  We giggled and told her that she had picked them so she had to keep them!

This ring was my mother's high school graduation ring from 1953.

 

 

So I wanted to share with you a few of the pieces I brought home that day.  They aren't valuable in a monetary sense, but the memories they evoke makes them priceless to me!  I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of my family's treasures.  What treasures do you have that have been passed down through the generations?




It's time for Show and Tell Friday over at My Romantic Home.

 and

I'm linking up for Vintage Thingie Thursday over at the Colorado lady.