Houses Gardens People: These Locally Made Tassels Are Like Jewelry

....and there's a reason for that. Keep reading.

Victoria Fahardo lives in Rockwall where she works out of her house handcrafting drapery tie backs, key tassels, chair ties, and lamp finial tassels out of gold and semi-precious stones

such as Chinese azurite (blue mixed with green), light and dark aragonite (yellow and burnt yellow), bamboo coral, and red howlite.

When she moved from Colombia to New York 30 years ago, it was to work in fashion for Donna Karan, where she designed and developed handbags, belts, shoes and other accessories. After 17 years working for Karan, she went back to school to study jewelry-making.

and then, at age 50, she moved to the Hamptons to work as an interior decorator. At 57, she got married and moved with her husband to Rockwall (she loves it here in Texas, by the way), and with the urging of her new friend Robert Rutherford, began her first collection, which she called Custom Made Antiques.

the entire first collection was inspired by a single earring.

Some of her pieces are crafted from pewter or brass.

Rutherford's picked up a part of her line, and Cory Pope, who opened his new showroom with her work, picked up another part. I first saw it when I was at Cory Pope's, looking around right before they opened. It looked just like jewelry to me, and so when I contacted Victoria about doing a story on her tassels for Modern Luxury (the story is out now, in their May issue) I wasn't too surprised to learn that she also made jewelry.

The cords and tassels are silk

So many people buy her passmenterie for their homes and end up wearing them around their necks, she says. Tassels don't fall correctly on the body, she says, so to answer the demand, she has just created a small collection of jewelry, inspired by her passmenterie. You can see some of the first pieces, below:

She's designed them so they lay flat against the chest, and are made with gold chains instead of silk around the neck and for the tassels.