About eCharmonyI saw my first shield charm bracelet in an antiques market in Greenwich, England on a trip to London and I've been hooked ever since. I have collected these charms for many years, dreaming of seeing these beautiful faraway places. I am now selling off some of my collection and duplicate charms to pay for a trip to Europe, (hence my seller name eCharmony, it stands for ebay charm money).
I'm hoping to experience the real "charm" of these places firsthand. I'm trading my treasured charms for stamps in my passport and the most valuable thing of all. Creating new memories.
Vintage Enamel Travel Shield Charm Collectors Guide
I created the Shield Charm Collectors Guide as a place to manage my
ever growing collection of travel shield charms, to share my collection
of charms, bracelets and necklaces with other collectors and to display
an assortment of travel charms from collections from around the world.
This guide is a great resource for travel charm collectors.
It was my original intent to own one of every shield charm ever manufactured but I soon realized that with the thousands of charms available it would be much more practical to concentrate on collecting charms from my favorite places.
While exploring this hobby I’ve learned that it is difficult to locate charms that are desired because there are limits on the amount of keywords that can be used to describe products on auction sites such as ebay. You pretty much have to know exactly what you are looking for or you have to keep looking through available listings until something catches your eye. I found this process time consuming and frustrating, so I tried to locate some type of guide book, or old catalog from the original manufacturer of these charms to assist me in my charm search. No luck there, even though a fellow collector friend in Germany thinks that it exists.
I decided to turn the gallery into a Collector’s Guide database to help other Travel Shield Charm collectors in their efforts to locate the charms that they want. Some day I will publish a printed version. Charms can be searched by country, state, continent, or place name by using any keyword.
This guide will:• provide a comprehensive list of charms which were manufactured
• assist collectors in locating charms that are for sale
• serve as an environment where you can share your love for this hobby with others
• give you a place to organize and document your collection (please contact me if you'd like more info)
I will be adding links to my favorite selling resources around the world to help those of you who want to purchase charms or buy them on auction. It is my intention that this Collector’s Guide will be a collaborative effort. If you are interested in sharing tips with others, links to charm resources, or if you would like to add photos of your collections or bracelets please email me at buy@echarmony.com.
To pay for the new charms that I am collecting, I will be selling my collection of German charms in the next few months, as time allows.
To BUY charms Click Here.
About Shield Charms:These sterling silver enamelled souvenir travel shield charms were popular with European, British and American travelers in the 1940's, 1950's 1960's, 1970's, and are highly collectible items today. The colorful vintage / retro look is very appealing to collectors and are quite the conversation piece. Some have a vintage patina and some look like they are brand new even if they are over 50 or 60 years old. They are wearable postcards and miniature works of art.
Women documented their travels by collecting a souvenir shield charm depicting the town or country coat of arms crest, a scenic picture of the area, castles, a famous landmark (Eiffel Tower), building (White House), person from history (Mozart) or an event (Olympics).
The English charms usually have baked in enamel and have an ornate sterling silver scroll pattern around the edges. A lot of the Austrian shield charms have a gorgeous embossed Austria Crest (Österreich Wappen) on the backs.
Each colorful charm is a fond memory of a place visited. I often wonder who the women were who collected and wore these travel bracelets, what they saw while they visited, what they did, what they learned...I'd like to have known them.
My personal charm bracelet:
All rights reserved. All text, content, and photographs on this page copyright © 2007 by eCharmony. None of this material may be reproduced in any form, or linked to electronically, without the express written permission of the author.
This product was added to our catalog on Thursday 12 April, 2007.