Gujarati choker necklace

Description

22Kt gold bead choker necklace with a very large center filigree and granulated hollow gold bead.

A choker is a close-fitting necklace, worn high on the neck. This type of jewellery can consist of one or more bands circling the neck. Chokers can be made of a variety of materials, including velvet, beads, metal and leather.

What is filigree?
Filigree, also known as telkari, the name given in Anatolia, meaning “wire work”, is a jewel work of a delicate kind made with twisted threads usually of gold and silver or stitching of the same curvy motif. It often suggests lace, and is most popular in French fashion decoration from 1660 to the present. It is now exceedingly common for ajoure jewellery work to be mislabeled as filigree. While both have many open areas, filigree involves threads being soldered together to form an object and ajoure involves holes being punched, drilled, or cut through an existing piece of metal.

The word, which is usually derived from the Latin filum, thread, and granum, grain, is not found in Ducange, and is indeed of modern origin. According to Prof. Skeat it is derived from the Spanish filigrana, from “filar”, to spin, and grano, the grain or principal fibre of the material.

Though filigree has become a special branch of jewel work in modern times, it was anciently part of the ordinary work of the jeweler. A. Castellani states, in his “Memoir on the Jewellery of the Ancients” (1861), that all the jewelry of the Etruscans and Greeks (other than that intended for the grave, and therefore of an unsubstantial character) was made by soldering together and so building up the gold rather than by chiselling or engraving the material.