My grandmother’s silver bangle bracelet is one of my favorite possessions. It’s perfect for me with the embossed bird design. I like to think it’s a loon, but who knows. I wear it almost daily and have this nasty habit of unconsciously removing it when working on my laptop – and then go into a panic when I can’t find it.

My grandmother’s sister, Grace Strobel Swingle (one of three siblings), was an art teacher in Roseville, Ohio. She was a few years older than “Mother,” as I referred to my grandma. Mom said that she remembers Aunt Grace made all sorts of jewelry and likely made this bangle for her sister. The embossing on the inside of the bracelet features my grandmother’s maiden name – Ruth Strobel. I have fond memories of Aunt Grace visiting for Christmas when she often shared handmade gifts.

My grandmother married my grandfather, John Bender, on 29 December 1937. Given that the bangle cuff bears her maiden name, I can assume that the bracelet is at least 83 years old as of 2020.

I like the design so much that I played around with drawing it. When that didn’t go well, I rolled out some play dough and made an impression of it.

A photograph of that allowed me to trace the design on my computer.

Then I thought about creating a linoleum block print carving of it to print. I gave Paul an inverted picture of my computer drawing. He used that to carve some linoleum block on his X-Carve machine – the carving bit removed all of the black area.

The machine didn’t do a great job with the small squares/dots on the ends of the design. I ended up cutting those out of the linoleum when I cleaned it up.

Finally, I made a print from the linoleum block carving. It took about 12 takes to get one print that I was somewhat happy with. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this now, but the making was fun!