www.925-1000.com

if it is really really cold it's more likely to be quartz - if it did turn out to be an actual gem topaz (not quartz) you'd be well advised to have it put into a more protective setting - for reasons cited above. the jeweller, if he is a gemmologist, will be able to identify the stone exactly, even ...

my first guess for this ring would be glass. this may help: let a small drinking glass and the ring sit in a cool spot for an hour. put each against your cheek. if the stone is warmish - plastic. if it is as cool as the glass - glass. it if feels like ice then you have a gemstone tho still an uniden...

highly unlikely to be anything other than plastic from that time period. however - one thing you can do is to look at the sides of the insulators with a loupe. ivory will give you cross-hatching - in some direction, so you might have to look all around before you come across evidence thereof; ivory ...

this is for feeding infants; as byron said, it is used to push the pablum onto the spoon.
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need the photo
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be careful when you search on the net; use "handarbeit co." rather than omitting the quotes. when you do that you find that there is no company by that name. what you do find, when quotes are omitted, is that the first and the second words occur somewhere on the page but not necessarily to...

fatso that is a modern font = modern date. there is always the possibility that the marks were deliberately rubbed to obfuscate the date, but most likely they just happened to be on the receiving end of a polishing obsession.
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what you have is cooked amber. the amber is heated until it gets internal fractures. since amber has been found that contains insects (very rare) and plant matter, cooking it is a popular way to create what could be inclusions such as "seeds" (close-up of the ring) that then raises the sal...

tho this is not silver it can be cleaned up very nicely with a liquid cleaner such as goddards. use an old nail brush that has become useless for the job - the bristles will be soft enough to be used here. lay it on a plate and pour the goddards on the brush, then gently brush front and back. rinse ...

The Leonard Silver Manufacturing Company was started in 1969. It's founder, Leonard Florence, used a local garage in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to market silver plate holloware. Products were manufactured by firms in India. The company was acquired by Towle Silversmiths in 1978. At that time, the headq...

Here's the thing about French hallmarks: they are generally small but extremely intricate and detailed. Your mark is not the French Minerva, which you can see at http://www.925-1000.com/Ffrench_marks.html

pewter

Tom - you're right of course- sometimes my mental shorthand gets me into trouble . . . every metal item belonging to a great household was identified in some way by monogram or crest, with or without any other form of ID. I wonder, though, about the one-kilo plate being used for food - more likely t...

if the arms are from the Duchy of Brittany and the motto that of Anne, I doubt they would appear on a pewter plate. Silver would have been the metal of choice for the exalted; high-status tableware, however, was plain, round, with high sides and not a lip but a thickened rim - rather more bowl-like....

the armorial belongs to the duchy of Brittany; the motto belonged to Anne of Brittany
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I have now looked through my books of ancient, obsolete, disused and uncommon language scripts and find nothing that resembles it. It is too blocky to be an Arabic tongue, and it is too unornamented to be Sanskrit or similar and it is not rounded enough to be Burmese and its like. Also it is not one...

Kasper -- I ought to have bookmarked it - today it does not appear. The page was of a live auction also carried on eBay, with no date and no further information given.

you find this also in other decorative Italian work - bases of crystal bowls that appear sculpted out of silver and pictures of boats, horses, madonnas etc also silvered over. They can trick the unwary into thinking that the entire object is silver. Always good to remember that silver is relatively ...

what leads you to believe that it is Quebecois or Canadian?

LOL! how foolish of me - of course it says sterling in the bottom part of the picture! since it does not say House of Philip Oriel, my opinion is that it would be the previously mentioned Philip Oriel Company that sometimes has the third component mark - rather than the Sheffield one that is always ...