Making a Pair of Anglo-Saxon Style Disc Brooches

Disc brooches! Complete with reflective, hand polished fine silver foils from sheet rolled in-house -which, foils seem to be an oft neglected detail when it comes to replicas for the historical reenactment market, so it was a detail I particularly wanted to be sure to include and try to tackle when making these brooches inspired by historical artifacts.

This video walks through the numerous and varied steps in the creation of these brooches, from transferring my sketch from my notebook onto metal, to constructing the cells and walls, to grinding the garnet-red glass gems by hand and setting them in place.

Almost every step is at least briefly touched on and addressed -but even still, lots of experimentation and work didn't make it into the video and much more could be said about many parts of many steps throughout the process, as well as about the many things learned along the way. Thank God I can only remember so much at once and can only talk for so long, for the sake of both your sanity and mine.

Because I'm a fan of history and the mysteries of how objects such as these were created historically, I'll include below a number of links to pdfs and sites which I enjoyed in my search for information about early medieval garnet cloisonné, and found invaluable on this quest to create some cloisonné work of my own. Enjoy!


• "Back to Front: Observations on the development and production of decorated backing foils for garnet cloisonné"
https://www.hmsjournal.org/index.php/...
(great pictures of foils, interesting hands-on experiments, and helpful info that IMO pairs very well with the two links below about the Tjitsma die and the production of foil dies in general. I found the information contained here along with the info from the two links below particularly interesting & illuminating)

• "The Tjitsma (Wijnaldum) die: a 7th century tool for making a cross-hatched pattern on gold foil, or a master template?"
https://www.hmsjournal.org/index.php/...

• "Precision Lost Wax Casting"
https://exarc.net/issue-2012-3/ea/pre...
(A very cool look at foils and the Tjitsma/Wijnaldum die under a microscope, as well as a look at experimental molds and attempts at casting bronze dies of comparable quality to the best surviving portions of the Tjitmsa die)

• https://zellwerk.hypotheses.org/tag/c...
(Interesting and helpful info about disc brooch construction, and experiments with regard to patterned foil production by hand with a creaser/knife-like tool. This site was a hidden gem and a particularly exciting and fun find for me when I finally stumbled into it. Full of good and practical info which helped inform my own attempts at foil and die production and garnet cloisonné style work)

• "Mineralogy of the Louvres Merovingian garnet cloisonné jewelry: Origins of the gems of the first kings of France"
http://www.minsocam.org/msa/collector...
(An analysis of the garnets from artifacts discovered at Louvres, with the aims of identifying the types of garnet used as well as the locations where these particular gems originated from)

• "Scientific analysis of the gold disc-on-bow brooch"
https://www.janinevanreekum.nl/webnew...

• "A group of Merovingian brooches from the collection of the Comtesse de Béhague (1870-1939)"
https://www.samfogg.com/usr/library/d...

• "Garnet Trade in Early Medieval Europe: The Italian Network"
https://hal.science/hal-03732735/docu...
(this document has some great info and some incredible, helpful, high quality, close-up pictures of loose cloisonné garnets)

• "LATE ANTIQUE, MIGRATION PERIOD AND EARLY BYZANTINE GARNET CLOISONNE ORNAMENTS.
ORIGINS, STYLES AND WORKSHOP PRODUCTION"
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint...
(unfortunately I still haven't finished reading this 500 page thesis, but what information I gleaned when listening to it while working on this project was interesting, helpful, and valuable on the journey. I really should finish listening...)

• "A Vendel Period gold and garnet pendant from Gamla Uppsala"
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get...

• "Early Byzantine Jewellery from Olbia"
https://hal.science/hal-04060191/docu...


Links to forums discussing garnets forming in flat sheets rather than in the usual geometric shape:

https://orchid.ganoksin.com/t/oddball...

https://www.gemologyonline.com/Forum/...

https://www.mindat.org/mesg-145158.html