Limited to 500 numbered copies in sterling silver.

Ultimately I evolved a series of Twelve Annual Limited Edition Bells …which began with my first-ever bell, a Celtic design at the holiday season in 1981. I often quip that I must have been a monk in some scriptorium in a previous life. I had been studying that knotty puzzle of a visual vocabulary in my jewelry work for some time.

The second year involved an attempt to be too original & to make a flat bell… which helped me learn to appreciate why there’s a traditional shape for delivering good bell sound. It also began my exploration into how that resounding tradition can be stretched into new sculptural forms & still produce resonance.

By the third year I was becoming hooked on the idea of making bells & I was doing more than a single design per year. They were beginning to catch my clientele’s attention & to sell, in spite of the advice I was receiving that I was probably wasting my time & talent, which would make better economic sense if applied to more immanently salable rings or earrings

These designated annual designs continued to speak out for each year as messages in numerological notion or symbolic language. By the end of those first dozen LIMITED EDITION designs I had satisfied the essential parts of such a round of ideas.

In the process I continued to give myself an education. I learned new language like the word "Lustrum", which came fortuitously in my reading just as I needed a name for my fifth year’s design. I acquired new depth in my knowledge of the symbolic meanings which have become attached to numbers, as well as the geometric, non literal, divisions of the physical forms those numbers could take.

The Dozens of Dozens Bell closed the series in 1992… I had become irritated by the bookkeeping of those tetchy records, which came oftimes to involve deep family histories of my precious clientele with reserved numbers… many of whom automatically collected each year’s design, & sometimes several as ongoing gifts. But I suspected they were not going to easily track with my thirteenth design… which I knew would involve a skull!

This annual series adds up to quite a rich palette of ideas & dialogues… between parts of me & periods of time … but always in a conversational trio with the bells themselves.