Bone has been used in jewelry making for thousands of years. But quite honestly, do we really know where the bone we use comes from? Nope. One participant at a beading party was slightly alarmed and actually asked me about the bone beads in my collection - like, were they human? I reassured her they weren't but I thought it might be cow bone but I couldn't be sure.

One designer who does know where his bone comes from is Andrew Ross for his raw material came from an abattoir. A graduate of Dundee University (UK), Ross recently won the The New Designers Swarovski Crystal Palace Award for innovative product design. His prize was £1000 (approximately $2000) worth of crystals and a 2 years membership to newdesignersonline.co.uk. He said, "I’m impressed that Swarovski saw the potential of my project as mainstream material."


His winning idea was to convert waste cow bones into a variety of objects including jewelry. What's so great is his project shows all kinds of alternative uses for cow bones rather than being regulated to the dump. Cow bone used to be ground up as animal feed but that practice was halted when the BSE - bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease as most know it - crisis occurred. The infectious agent is spread when cattle, which are really herbivores, are fed the remains of other cattle in different forms including bone meal. If humans eat infected carcasses, they develop a variant of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD).

This designer's jewelry is markedly different from the bone jewelry we normally see. Instead of reshaping the bone material into beads, his necklace still retains the original shape of the bone. His ring is also unusual although it would be hard to pinpoint which bone in the cow's anatomy it came from. Any guesses?


Via

For more tutorials check out my Jewelry Making Tips

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