GRANDMOTHER’S PERANAKAN BROOCH • Jeweler Shows How to Make • George Town • MALAYSIA

Jonathan Yun and I’m a jeweler based in Penang. I sell handmade, mostly silver jewelry.

I’ve got three main ranges, the coral ocean based on my diving experience, the Eden, based on the garden and of course I have the vintage range based on the Peranakan jewelry. I have to draft the design out first and do it on a working paper. After that I paste it on the flat sheet like this and then saw out the individual parts. It takes very long, say, to cut out something like this because the patterns are very intricate. So if I want to shape them, I shape the individual parts. This is a flower part. After we file the parts.

As you can see when we are doing soldering, the metal becomes blackened. That’s alright because you can dunk it in the acid. The metal is polished now. This is the main body. So I’m going to put them together again. So its made out of multiple parts in the front. This is the finished product. Its just a different design but basically the concept is the same.

Peranakan is basically a mash-up between the Malay and Chinese cultures. My maternal grandmother lived like a nyonya. She would wear the brooches and wear the kebaya. So we grew up with that.

This is the cutest and the smallest. Some of them are tall and elegant like this one. This one has got a lot of personality.

The shape which points to the heart is the mother’s heart because this is a mother’s brooch. They are newly designed, newly made. So they are not replicas. Its my way of contributing to the society I came from. Making this is to keep the design alive.