THE GOLD THAT ALREADY BELONGS TO YOU

There's a plastic bag on my desk right now.

Inside it are a collection of tiny stones. Cloudy diamonds. Chipped sapphires. The kind of stones that were set into rings decades ago when tiny and included was considered acceptable. They came out of a collection of broken and unworn rings that a customer brought me a few weeks ago.

She didn't want them back. There's nothing to do with them. They sit on my desk as the unglamorous remnant of a transformation that happened around them.

Because everything else became something extraordinary.

What people don't realise about old jewellery

Most people have a collection somewhere. A drawer, a box, a bag in the back of the wardrobe. Broken chains. Rings that belonged to someone else. Pieces that were loved once and then stopped being worn. Pieces that were never quite right but felt too significant to throw away.

With gold at record prices right now people are looking at those collections differently. Suddenly aware that what's sitting unworn in a drawer has real material value. Wondering what to do with it.

Most jewellers will tell you they can melt it down and make something new. That's true. That's also the least interesting version of the story.

What I do is different. I make something that carries where it came from into what it becomes.

The first thing that happens

When someone brings me a collection of old pieces the first thing I do is clean them properly. Years of wear, tarnish, hand cream, life. It all comes off in the cleaning and suddenly you can see what you actually have.

Then the stones come out. Old pieces often contain stones that sound impressive and aren't. Tiny diamonds with significant inclusions. Sapphires with chips. Stones that were set with more optimism than quality. These go into a bag and we decide together what to do with them. Sometimes they're worth keeping. Often they're not.

Then I weigh what's left. The metal. The actual gold or silver that's been sitting there all this time waiting to be something else.

What the metal tells you

Old jewellery collections are rarely uniform. A 9ct yellow gold ring from the seventies. A white gold piece from the nineties. A touch of 18ct from a piece that was once someone's best thing.

Different carats. Different colours. Different histories.

When you melt them together something interesting happens. The metal finds its own identity. The percentages of gold and other metals in the finished piece don't match any standard carat exactly. It becomes its own alloy. Its own colour. Something between yellow and white with a warmth that's entirely specific to this particular collection of pieces from this particular life.

You can't buy that colour in a jeweller's catalogue. It exists only because of the specific combination of everything that was brought to me.

The rolling ball of liquid metal

The melting is one of the most extraordinary things to watch if you've never seen it.

The pieces go into the crucible. The torch goes on. The impurities burn away. And then the metal comes together into a single rolling ball of liquid gold that moves like something alive.

That moment is where the old pieces stop being a collection of broken and unworn things and become something with potential. Pure material. Ready to become whatever it needs to be.

I pour it into an ingot mould chosen specifically for what it will become. A ring needs a different shape than a pendant. A bangle needs a different thickness than a charm. The mould is the first decision about what this particular gold wants to be.

What Nikki's gold became

Nikki brought me a collection of rings. Some broken. Some simply unworn. A mixture of carats and colours that melted down to something approximating 12ct with its own particular warmth.

She wanted to keep her family close. The large heart for her daughter, engraved with the word Family. Two tiny hearts for her own bracelet, one for each of her children's initials.

When I cut the large heart from the rolled sheet of gold the corners gave me two small almost triangular offcuts. I looked at them for a moment and knew immediately what they were. Two tiny fat little hearts. One for each child. Nothing wasted. Everything exactly where it needed to be.

The D shaped loop on each heart, not a circle but almost, means they sit absolutely flat against the skin. The chain lies flat. The heart lies flat. The weight of the gold is present without being felt as weight. It just feels right in a way that's hard to explain until you put it on.

The pieces went on the courier this morning. The old stones are still in a bag on my desk.

The gold that was sitting broken and unworn in a drawer is now three hearts carrying one family's story forward into the next generation.

What you need to know if you have old pieces

You don't need a large collection. A single broken chain or an unworn ring is enough to start a conversation.

You don't need to know what you want. Most people don't when they first come to me. That's part of the process. We look at what you have, talk about who it came from and what it means, and the piece reveals itself gradually.

You don't need to worry about the value of what you're bringing. The gold already belongs to you. The making is what you're commissioning.

And you don't need to be sentimental about the original pieces. What matters is what they carry. The story, the person, the feeling. That transfers to the new piece even when the form is completely different.

The old pieces become something you'll wear every day. Something that carries everyone it came from without looking like a museum piece or a memorial. Something that sits quietly on your wrist or your collarbone and just feels like you.

Because the gold already belongs to you. It just needed someone to show it what it could become.

Sue Dunmore, Porini Design Studio, Tararua District, New Zealand.

If you have old pieces sitting in a drawer that deserve a new life get in touch. porinidesign.com/commissions