Bacca Pearls

Julya, who has been in the US  for the summer, heads back to Shanghai tomorrow. For the past few days, her life has been consumed with organizing… leading up to the dreaded packing. To be honest, packing to come to the USA and then back to China is never an easy feat for either of us - we’re always bringing a TON of raw materials and finished jewelry to one place or the other. Sometimes, we are even forced to check some of these items… which gives us nightmares for the entire 20 hours that our bags are not in our possession (NOT a good idea, if you can avoid it). After 3 years of this, we’ve learned some pretty good tricks of the jewelry travel trade. Here are our recommendations:

1. If you have a long chain necklace that tends to get tangled, take a piece of gift wrap tissue paper and place the necklace long ways on the paper. Tightly wrap the paper around the necklace, then fold it into halves, and quarters. Put the wrapped up necklace in place where the tissue paper will stay put (maybe even tape it closed) so the necklace doesn’t move around.

2. Have a necklace that has both pearls and stones? Pearls can easily be scratched, so protect the pearl by wrapping it up in a little tissue or keep it separate by using a zip lock bag for the stone part of the necklace. Simply preventing the jewelry from being crammed into your jewelry travel bag will help, so make sure everything has its own space. If  your strand of pearls must to go in the same compartment as other jewelry, make sure it gets wrapped up in its own piece of fabric.

3. Don’t check your jewelry!! We hear horror stories all of the time. Check it out, it happens enough for us to worry.