The Lost Brooch
I’ve always loved old things.
Old houses, beautiful architecture, vintage furniture, anything that has already lived a little. There’s something about knowing an object existed in another time, in another home, as part of someone else’s everyday life. These things have stories, even when we don’t always know what those stories are. But vintage jewelry? That happened almost by accident.
It started with an antique brooch watch.
My husband and I inherited his mother’s condo, along with everything inside it. It was a hoarding situation, and there were boxes and boxes of things to sort through, including bags and boxes of jewelry that, at the time, I assumed was mostly costume jewelry without much significance.
Then one evening, a friend mentioned that she’d recently become interested in vintage brooches and jewelry. I remembered an unusual piece I’d found: a Victorian brooch with a tiny watch attached to it, engraved and dated 1902. I told her she had to come see it.
One brooch turned into opening another box. Then another. Before we knew it, we’d spent the entire evening looking up pieces one by one, trying to identify designers, figuring out when they were made, learning the names of collections, and discovering that people actually searched for and collected jewelry I hadn’t thought twice about.
And then we found the hummingbird. It was a beautiful little brooch, and when we looked it up, we found another being offered for far more than either of us expected. My husband took it to our jeweler later that week. It was real. It was old. And it was worth quite a bit of money.
I was hooked.
I started spending my evenings going through the jewelry piece by piece. Some were inexpensive costume jewelry. Some turned out to be collectible designer pieces. And every so often, something we’d assumed was costume jewelry turned out to be very real.
But the more we uncover, the more I’ve realized that value isn’t necessarily the most interesting part.
We’re nowhere near finished going through the condo. As each room is cleared and another box is opened, we’re beginning to understand why so much of this was kept in the first place.
There are pieces connected to Japan, Australia and Hawaii. Things from the years following World War II. Military items, orders and promotions. Jewelry, accessories and little objects from different places and different moments in time.
What initially looked like boxes of stuff has slowly started revealing pieces of a life. And that’s really what The Lost Brooch has become.
I research what I can, who made something, when it was made, where it may have come from and what makes it interesting. Some pieces end up in my keep pile, which admittedly seems to be getting larger.
But I can’t keep everything. I’d much rather see these things go to someone who looks at a piece and thinks, I have to have that, than put it back into a box and hope that maybe someday my daughter will want any of it.
So you’ll find more than brooches here. You’ll find jewelry, accessories, curiosities and whatever else we uncover along the way.
Some things may be valuable. Some may simply be beautiful, unusual, nostalgic or wonderfully strange.
But they all get another chance to be found. Beautiful things deserve to be loved more than once.
And when one of these pieces finds its next person, its story gets to keep going.