Confessions of a Crystal Hoarder Blog

Forget “Confessions of a Bead Hoarder”, this month it is “Confessions of a Hoard Stalker”! Luckily, Suzanne encourages me rather than getting a restraining order. 

I’ve been on an internet scavenger hunt since before I started subscribing to the Bead Hoard Curiosities Club. It was that article…I think it’s every vintage supply aficionado’s dream that you go next door for coffee and find out that your elderly neighbor is the Anastasia of costume jewelry production.

eBay, Etsy, and Pinterest are the Ancestry.com of costume jewelry. Sometimes the data’s hard to find, but if you search hard you can find the family history of the Hoard. And the Hoard has some pretty famous cousins.

The search actually started on accident. In Bakelite Schmakelite I shared an image of a Bakelite YSL belt. I’d been cruising around the web looking for a chain belt to scavenge for links, and lo and behold…I’d seen those Bakelite

Shortly after receiving my first Club box I found this Hobe necklace, and got that same feeling again…haven’t we met? I had a little bag of these very same dimpled faux pearl links from my box! I used some mine for my cousin’s bridal jewelry, and I'm slowly coloring the rest with alcohol inks.

But Hobe wasn't the only jewelry house to use items found in the Hoard. The original owners of the Hoard were definitely suppliers to Coro. I routinely find images with the same parts- or strikingly similar to parts that arrive in the mail each month.

Coro has become my favorite costume jewelry manufacturer. Their jewelry is festive (mostly-the war metals series must have been patriotic at the time) and doesn't seem to take itself as seriously as some of the other houses. After all, jewelry is supposed to entertain your eyes!

I tumbled into my Coro obsession while searching for moonglow examples…which sent me off with the search term of “thermoset”. That in turn spiraled into admiring all of the inventive (read: non-round) cabochon shapes used in vintage jewelry. I’ll warn you now that you’ll have to fight me off if a stash of funky shaped thermoset cabs are uncovered!

On the other hand, sometimes haunting eBay just makes me shake my head. Why are people using paper towels as backdrops? One of the images above was described as “VTG ANTIQ ESTATE VICTORIAN ART DECO MOONGLOW LUCITE”. Ummm… Unless they mean that like their cousin Vicki owned it and thought it was art that was decorative…

On my searches I've also found Hoard-alikes in signed pieces by Miriam Haskell, Sarah Coventry, Avon (those two are sort of the same thing sometimes), Selro, Lisner, Graziano, and Napier. No Juliana or Trifari yet that I've identified…but it could just be that those bits haven’t arrived in our club boxes yet. Or I wasn't looking hard enough.

Since most of the big costume jewelry manufacturers were clustered in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, they often got their pieces from the same sources. The four pieces above all featuring gemasite cabs (confetti Lucite is how they are sometimes listed) are from different jewelry manufacturers.

Other pieces aren't signed, but they are definitely items from the Hoard that made it to freedom. I wasn't expecting to find our plastic faceted discs, but stumbled across them when looking up sequined earrings. I did find tons of sequined earrings, as well as some beaded sweaters and cardigans that were familiar. But there they were…those faceted discs!

So keep your eyes out! The Hoard is EVERYWHERE! Come to think of it now…perhaps I’m not so much a Hoard stalker as a Hoard Whisperer. That or there’s some sort of Hoard conspiracy…

Maybe my next piece should be a foil helmet so the Hoard won’t know what I’m thinking…it will need rhinestones of c