Whitby Jet Set...about us
The North Yorkshire coast around Whitby is a very special place. Its historic and literary associations are well-known (who hasn't heard of Dracula?!). But what makes it really special to us is that everywhere we walk, we are surrounded by the remains of the far distant past - a past that predates mankind.
Walking on beaches where ammonites hide in stone nodules, where the snouts of prehistoric marine crocodiles emerge from cliff falls and where plesiosaurs are uncovered by the pounding waves, is quite literally thrilling.
We aren't really fossil hunters though - we leave that to the experts. But the wonders of the past are to us more miraculous than anything science fiction or fantasy can invent.
Though we've never found any dinosaur footprints, and probably never will, we love to collect the fossilised remains of the trees they once scratched their backs against. Whitby jet is what time and saltwater compression has made out of the ancester of a Jurassic tree, related to the modern monkey-puzzle, or Araucaria. It's the hardest jet in the world and has been prized since neolithic times.
We hand-collect it on the beach in all its shapes and sizes, some pieces crafted so beautifully by the North Sea that it's a shame to cut them up.
We love to make unique and quirky settings for our jet from sterling silver, and many of our pieces are one-off designs that we don't repeat.
Some of our jewellery is made using sterling silver castings and you may see similar items elsewhere - it's a way of keeping prices down but making something that is within everyone's price range. But much of what we make is hand-crafted by ourselves from sterling silver, and the component pieces are painstakingly soldered together and shaped and may take several hours to complete.
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