Somebody spent years filling this tray. Twenty compartments, and not one of them sits empty. There is a rhinestone umbrella with a fringe that swings, a fawn with a red glass eye, a cameo cut black against white, and a gold circle with the word Mother across it in script. Every one of these was somebody’s favorite pin once.
What makes a tray like this fun is the range. A silver angelfish beside a red and black enamel pinwheel. A dragonfly with a green stone body. A spray of mother-of-pearl petals. A gold ribbon bow with a tiny enameled American flag at the knot. Two clusters of glass beads, one cornflower blue and one an unapologetic chartreuse, belonging to no decade but their own.
The small oval in the fourth row is worth finding first. It is a micromosaic, a bouquet of red and blue flowers assembled from glass chips barely larger than grains of sand, a technique Italian workshops have been practicing for two centuries. At arm’s length it is a flower. Up close it is hundreds of separate pieces, each one set by hand.
Brooches have quietly come back around. They land on a denim jacket, a coat lapel, a canvas tote, a hat brim, and unlike most jewelry they do not care what size you are. The portrait brooch of the woman in the blue dress would do real work on a plain black sweater. So would that amber cluster.
The tray is out and open, so you can pick them up and hold them against your coat before you decide. Come do exactly that at Pollyanna’s Antiques in downtown Mt. Clemens, open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 to 4.