The Jewellery We Carry

Some objects feel almost alive. They hold our fingerprints, our hesitations, the small murmurs of memory we never speak aloud. Jewellery has always been that way for me. Not decoration. Not status. Something closer to a private geography. A map of who we were, who we have been, and the parts of us that wait quietly to be reclaimed.

During a trip to Langkawi Island for my husband’s birthday, I chose a few new pieces of jewellery. Selecting them in Malaysia where my debut novel, The Red Silk Dress, was first born felt like a small ceremony. A way of carrying the book’s earliest stirrings into the life I am now building in Portugal. There was something elemental about it, a sense of touching the past without returning to it, of gathering something that had been left in another season of my life.

Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn to the craft and quiet intelligence of Portuguese filigree, one of the country’s most enduring jewellery arts. Since moving here, I notice it everywhere from museum cases to the boutiques of Lisbon. And on our anniversary in October, my husband gifted me a filigree ring from a Pousada, one of Portugal’s historic hotels. It felt like a blessing from this country, a small piece of Portugal resting against my skin.

Filigree belongs to a lineage of craft that values patience and precision, beauty and meaning held in the same breath. It is an art of transformation: gold or silver heated until it softens, drawn into threads so fine they seem almost weightless, then shaped curve by curve into delicate lacework. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced.

The form emerges through the maker’s attentive hands.

Filigree is, in many ways, an art of memory. To create it, the metal must first be undone heated, stretched, drawn out until it becomes something it never was. Only then can it be woven into forms that endure. There is a lesson in that. A reminder that delicacy is not the opposite of strength, and that the spaces between the threads are as deliberate as the threads themselves. Absence can hold as much meaning as presence.

This month, I stepped inside one of Lisbon’s oldest filigree ateliers, Joalharia do Carmo, to film a short reading from my novel. In Chiado, it sits like a small jewel box of the city’s memory, a pause in its heartbeat. The kind of place where the air holds the quiet weight of craft and history. Founded in 1924, the shop has spent a century honouring the traditions of Portuguese filigree. Its cases are lined with gold worked into lace Viana hearts, spirals, threads as fine as breath each piece crafted in the ateliers of Póvoa de Lanhoso and Gondomar, shaped by a tradition that has travelled through centuries yet still feels astonishingly fragile and modern. The moment you step inside, the light shifts. The room feels hushed, almost devotional, as if the craft itself asks you to slow your pulse.

It is here, surrounded by the art of patient hands, that I have filmed this month’s passage from the novel.

As I prepared to film, surrounded by this lacework of gold, a small moment from the early chapters of The Red Silk Dress came to mind. My main character, Claudette, opens a jewellery box and rediscovers a pair of diamond earrings she once loved. The scene is quiet. Nothing outwardly significant happens. Yet something inside her quietly begins to shift.

Here is the passage:

Rolling the studs between her fingertips, the diamonds caught the light and shimmered. They had been a gift from John, her professor, over twenty years ago, when she received a fashion design scholarship in Rome the one she had never accepted. Since arriving at Raffles, the memories of that time felt raw and vivid. She wondered what he was doing now and how his life had turned out. She was glad to have brought the earrings; they represented a small but significant part of her past.

What moves me in this moment is its stillness. Claudette is not making a decision. She is not walking away from anything. She is simply touching an object that connects her to a younger version of herself she had set aside. And that is often how longing returns not with a dramatic gesture, but with a small acknowledgement that something inside is stirring again.

Standing in the Lisbon atelier, I felt the resonance between this scene and the craft around me. Both speak to the slow reweaving of identity. Both honour the delicate work of forming something new from something softened. Both recognise that beauty and strength are not opposites, but partners in the deeper work of becoming.

Portugal has taught me something about this. The country has its own way of listening to light, to slowness, to memory. Its art forms tiles, poetry, fado and its landscapes of rolling vineyards and open seas invite us into a different tempo of self-understanding. They remind us that transformation often begins quietly, in the places we return to without knowing why.

Next month, I will offer another reflection and short reading from the novel, filmed in a place in Portugal that continues to open and stir something in me.

For now, I offer this simple thought. Sometimes the things we carry against our skin are the very things that guide us home.

www.theredsilkdress.com

About Natalie:

Natalie Turner is a British author based in Lisbon. Her debut novel, The Red Silk Dress (February 2026), explores identity and longing. She also works internationally as a leadership advisor and is the founder of Women Who Lead

Photo Credits:

Touching story and craft in the same space.
Photo: Carl Hinds

An art of memory. Filigree at Joalharia do Carmo. Image courtesy of the Joalharia do Carmo

Author, Natalie Turner: Photo: Carl Hinds

Video:

The Jewellery We Carry: A Reading from The Red Silk Dress

Filmed inside one of Lisbon’s oldest filigree ateliers, this short reading is taken from The Red Silk Dress, Natalie Turner’s debut novel. Set within the quiet craft and history of Joalharia do Carmo in Chiado, Lisbon, the passage reflects on memory, longing, and the intimate objects that guide us back to ourselves.

Filming and editing:
Carl Hinds.