Sand Dollar Dove Necklace

One of my earliest designs...

This is the sand dollar dove necklace. I designed it over 20 years ago. For those of you who don’t know, sand dollars have five little bird shaped shells that come when you break them apart. These birds are said to represent peace and goodwill while other people see them as angel’s wings.

I love the shape and delicacy of these little birds and thought I could make a mold and cast them into gold. I got some pushback from the jeweler at the time saying that the shell would break if he tried to make a mold, it wouldn’t work at all and he’d still have to charge me for it not working. I said lets do it.

I remember handing him a pill bottle (pill bottles and old film bottles with cotton were what we usually used then to store the delicate waxes). The pill bottle contained my favorite dove shell resting on a bed of cotton with alternating layers of doves and cotton below. I told him plainly let's try with this first one and if it breaks we have 4 more to try and I think it will work. I’m not sure which dove ended up being our winner, but the sand dollar dove necklace was born.

I have the original mold and ended up making a followup mold with a branch of four little doves. These are all still hand cast in a world of CAD and wax growing, and the beautiful texture from nature is preserved.

And now that I’ve finished writing this … I need to write a post on the history of the jewelry and how it’s made. When I started designing over twenty years ago it was all hand carved waxes, then CAD came into the mix (the computer models were very bulky and frankly bad at the beginning) and then CAD got better over the years but that’s another story for another day. xx