Steampunk jewelry started becoming The Next Big Thing sometime in.. 2006? 2007? I was a little late hopping on that bandwagon, but shortly after I finally started buying vintage watch gears on eBay, some other crafters went “uh, guys, what about radium I mean yeah probably not a lot of it but maybe let’s NOT sell radioactive jewelry???” and a bunch of us went “OH $#&!! GOOD POINT” and long story short, that’s why I own a Geiger counter. 

(Which I totally deducted as a business expense that year, because it turns out Geiger counters are NOT cheap. Also none of the watch parts I bought were radioactive, and neither was the dog. We checked.)

Here’s one of my favorite designs from my steampunk phase, featuring a vintage watch mechanism, blue goldstone, Swarovski crystals, an odd brass thingie I found on the floor at the vintage bead warehouse in NYC, and a brass bead.