Looking at today’s spoils…it seems a very small lot, for a day’s quite intense work.  There are some stone set clasps which caught my eye because they have posts which go into the drill hole of a full drilled pearl rather than rings for silk plus French wire. So they will need experimentation.  They could be the next big thing in opening and closing…but only if the adhesive adheres. I suspect that there is quite a stress on the glue fixing when the clasp is undone. But they look very pretty

Next I spent some time finding a very few decent 11-12mm black buttons. It;s hard to find black pearls still. There are smaller ones, but trying to match the larger ones for shape, colour, lustre and size……I also waded through smaller {9-10mm} natural colour buttons. Even from a huge bag I only found one pair which satisfied my criteria.I did get some of the singles though, because they had stunning lustre.

Finally I was spotted by the lady who used to look after me at one tahitian wholesaler, who told me she had now moved to another firm. We did some catching up and I looked at the pearl stock. I got a pair of lovely white Paspaley south sea drops from Australia, some gold round south sea pairs and some fun single tahitians, including a couple of what we decided are polemon pearls – aka pokepearls.