Jewellery From Recycled Silver

Melting down old jewellery,utensils and coins to fashion new jewellery is old hat in India.Local craftsmen do this routinely as their customers periodically refashion their jewellery.

But in the last few years,the higher bullion prices have made melting old zari,a profitable source of recycled precious metals.Hence the increasing popularity of buying old silk saris these days.‘Zari’,for the uninitiated, is silk thread, twisted with a thin silver wire and then gilded with gold.It is interleaved with the silk weave to create the designs or motifs on sarees like the Kancheevaram.

As an aside, in case you are thinking of buying/selling zari items here is  some useful information :By custom, 1 Kg of zari would have approximately 500 gms of pure silver, around 5-51/2 Gms of gold.The cost of the saree depends on the purity of the zari. But now a days the quantity of pure metal used is less – only 420 to 470 grams of silver and 3 to 3.5 grams of gold.And if you go for the gold standard in hand loom silks, as per the Geographical Indication (GI) label, a Kancheevaram saree should have 57% silver and 0.6% gold in the Zari. The Tamil Nadu State government has relaxed this ruling to 40% silver and 0.5% gold,to protect weavers in the face of the increased price of bullion.So good luck haggling for the recyclable metal. Read more of this post