The end of August was inter­est­ing: our eldest son moved to NYC, the earth shook (I was dri­ving dur­ing it and never felt a thing), our mid­dle son left for his first year at Bing­ham­ton Uni­ver­sity, and a hurricane/tropical storm blew in and blew out our power for five days. Oh, yes, and I had a birth­day dur­ing all of this. Oth­er­wise, it was a relax­ing cou­ple of weeks.

I’m happy to be back in blog-land and at my desk with my iMac, Twit­ter page (please join me @jewelhistory), and of course, Fash­ion Week in New York, a week long event that begins tomorrow.

Desert Sil­ver by Sigrid van Roode

A cou­ple of notable items to men­tion. I had plenty of time to read by the camp­ing lanterns my hus­band enjoys col­lect­ing. No, we don’t rough it in the wild (I’m a hotel-with-clean-bed-linens type…no sur­prise here). Still, we just seem to lose our power fre­quently enough to jus­tify his hobby. Desert Sil­ver: Nomadic and Tra­di­tional Sil­ver Jew­ellery From the Mid­dle East and North Africa by Sigrid van Roode explores this eth­nic genre of orna­ment in great detail and won­der­ful images. Its brief ninety-two pages is filled with the his­tory and cul­tural tra­di­tions of the sil­ver jew­elry worn by women of this region for cen­turies. Color and motif play a huge part to bring sym­bolic mean­ing to every piece — the book is an excel­lent ref­er­ence for con­tem­po­rary design­ers. Cartier Time Art: Mechan­ics of Pas­sion by Jack Fos­ter is glossy eye-candy with large, lumi­nous images of mys­tery clocks, watches, design sketches, celebri­ties wear­ing Cartier time pieces, paired with the his­tory of the company’s phe­nom­e­nal time keep­ing cre­ations. It is the cat­a­log accom­pa­ny­ing the cur­rent inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tion and it is a wor­thy hol­i­day gift for any watch col­lec­tor or Cartier aficionado.

Cartier Time Art by Jack Forster

Lastly, while jew­elry is the stuff of run­ways and red car­pets, the indus­try is work­ing towards increas­ing aware­ness that its func­tion and pur­pose in the world is more than skin deep. Jew­el­ers For Chil­dren is the industry’s lead­ing char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion that donates ninety-six per­cent of its rev­enue to chil­dren in need. JFC has raised more than thirty-seven mil­lion dol­lars for St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal®, the Make-A-Wish Foun­da­tion® of Amer­ica, the Eliz­a­beth Glaser Pedi­atric AIDS Foun­da­tion, and the National CASA Asso­ci­a­tion. They need more jew­el­ers to come on board and sup­port their efforts so if you or any jew­eler you know would like to get involved please visit www.jewelersforchildren.org

I’ll be back later in the week with news from the New York runways…