Drinking the Stars - necklace - antique vintage assemblage

This unusual pendant, suspended from several vintage brass chains, is an antique belt buckle with the buckle teeth and bar removed. In place of the bar, I engineered a wire holding a fabulous antique black glass star and brass button. The necklace went through several false starts until I felt it was balanced, comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

The chain is 15.5 inches (31-inch circumference). The buckle and button are 3.5 inches. The chain and  button dangle at the back of the neck are 4.25 inches.

I scour garage sales, auctions, stores and my life for antique and vintage components that I use in creating one-of-a-kind pieces.

COMPONENTS

• fancy antique cut steel and gold vermeil (?) belt buckle
• 4 superb antique metal buttons
• Art Nouveau square chain from Hayward tie clip
• 3 other kinds of brass chain

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"Invention"  —Barbara Hamby

I am personally indebted to antiquity because if it were left

to me nothing would have been invented. We would still be chasing

boars and clubbing them to death. No, that's too refined.

We'd still be eating grass and grubbing for worms.

How did they think up all that stuff? I'm not talking

about painting or literature. That's easy.

What could be more natural than sitting around a campfire

telling stories and then rhyming to make them easier to remember

or having two or three people take different parts?

Voila, poetry and theatre. I'm talking about bread.

Who thought of grinding wheat and mixing it with mold?

Forget bread. I can't get past wheat. Wheat must have been a weed

once. Who walked up to wheat and thought about growing

a whole field of it, picking it, smashing it together,

adding water, throwing it on a fire? Who were these

proto-chemists, these Neanderthal Marie and Pierre Curies

who harvested the grain?  To leap from throwing rocks at birds

and grilling them on a spit to Safeway is too great for me,

which leads to another subject if one picks up reading material

in supermarkets. Recently I discovered that alien civilizations

do not vacation on Earth anymore because we are too bellicose

and vulgar. Well, whose fault is it anyway? Anyone who thinks

that buffoons such as we could have thought up wheat,

not to mention architecture, axels, armor, artillery

is not taking his Lithium. There would still be about 250 of us

in caves somewhere in France if someone with big silver eyes

hadn't been buzzing around the universe, bored, sentimental,

and decided to stop and help us along. Next thing you know

there's agriculture, horticulture, apiculture. It's the only

logical explanation and if it weren't for the CIA,

everyone would agree with me. However, scientists in Russia,

Argentina, and the north of England (top-notch men,

every one of them) theorize that not only did the Andromedans

show us a few tricks, they also mated with the indigenous

species. Yuck, you might say, if they think we're creepy now,

just imagine what our manners were like ten or twenty thousand

years ago, though come to think of it, I doubt the alien haute

bourgeoisie was patrolling the outer reaches of the universe.

According to a test devised by these scientists, you can tell

if you are descended from extraterrestrials by certain physical

characteristics, such as blond hair, slender fingers,

musical ability (especially singing), big eyes, blue eyes,

which all point to a racially pure colony in Sweden

or Schleswig-Holstein for a few thousand years

and are somewhat reminiscent of our recent troubles in Europe

and Japan. I, for one, would like to toast an inventor:

Tchin, tchin, Dom Perignon, who said when he discovered

champagne, "My God, I am drinking the stars."

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