Oh So Pretty, or: Embrace the Chunky!

Before I got married, I was not much of a big jewelry wearer.

Sure, I owned a few necklaces, but the effort involved in adding them to an outfit before running out the door to work in the morning just never seemed worth it.  But as I planned my wedding, I was inspired by the photograph of the beautiful Nicole Miller wedding dress I had chosen to wear; in the glossy magazine picture of the dress, it was styled with a gorgeous chunky necklace. 

The picture inspired me to find my own gorgeous chunky necklace to wear with the dress (my wedding was also on a beach).   Browsing in my local independent jewelry store one day, I found this blue glass beauty:

On my wedding day, I got so many compliments the necklace, and it made me feel oh so pretty wearing it, that after the fun and glamour of the wedding was over I resolved to incorporate more fun, fabulous, jewelry into my daily wardrobe.  And I still wear that necklace often - with a black top and blue skirt it really pulls everything together.

Here are some of the many wonderful necklaces I've seen on Etsy recently.  Some of them would be the perfect accompaniment to a wedding dress, and others would be lovely just to jazz up a basic black top and jeans for an evening out.  They also make great gifts for bridesmaids.

So, go ahead, embrace the chunky! 

Go Green Necklace, $87, by Shop Cloverbelle

Steel gray pearl necklace with black satin ribbon, $28, from The Queen's Royal Coach

Midnight Moonstones Necklace, $68, from Kim Pipes Designs

Pearly Girly in Champagne, $95, from Virginia Geiger Jewels

Turquoise Abundance Necklace, $89, Surf and Sand

Golden Pretty Pearl Multistrand Necklace, $30, by Musette

What It Means

So, people sometimes ask me, why "By The Card"?  What on earth does it mean?

When I was looking for a name for my Etsy store, I turned to my husband, a professional philologist, who pulled out his trusty, dusty O.E.D. (that's the Oxford English Dictionary, if you weren't sure).  Knowing my love of wordplay and puns, he suggested the phrase "by the card", which according to the O.E.D. means exactly what it says in my store heading--to speak genteelly, with care and nicety. 

I liked the idea of reverting to an old-fashioned sense of what it means to communicate with others.  Everybody loves to get a letter in the mail.  When I sent out my wedding save the dates and invitations, it was one of the first times I had actually sent physical mail to many of my friends and family; I loved picturing the pieces of mail that I had lovely handcrafted making their journeys by sea and by plane and by truck all over the globe.

So, By The Card it was, especially taking into account the pun bonus ("buy the card!  get it?").

I recently googled the phrase, and came up with a fabulous New York Times article from July of 1873 (!), mourning the decline in the art of letter-writing.  While the piece mostly places blame for this on the shoulders of the growing "publicity" of the mail service: just think of all of the letter-carriers and nosy boarding-house matrons who would be able to read your private and possibly sentimental correspondence!  I wonder what the author would attribute the decline in formal letter-writing to today?

Here's the link to the piece (it's a PDF, so you must have Adobe Acrobat to read):
http://tinyurl.com/ykzuv9r