Silver teddy bear keychain with red bow

Reading the red bow on this teddy bear keyring, loop by loop

The bow is the one part of the piece that is neither silver nor black. It sits under the chin as two short loops of red enamel, and each loop is filled with red stones rather than left flat. Below the knot, two tails fall away at an angle, and each carries a single line of red stones running down to its cut tip. Above the bow the only red is the thin line of the mouth, so the colour sits low on the figure and holds together as one patch.

The two stones at the knot that are not red

Where the loops cross, two small iridescent stones sit one above the other. They turn blue, then green, then back again as the bear swings on its ring, and they are the only stones on the whole piece that change colour. The rest is fixed: clear across the head, the body, the arms and the legs, black at the eyes and under the feet, red along the bow. Two stones do all the shifting.

Set at the front, hollowed at the back

Front and back are not the same piece of work. The front is set almost everywhere, and in two sizes: wider stones across the forehead and cheeks, a much finer row wrapping the chin. The muzzle breaks the pattern, left as a smooth polished oval because it is too domed to hold a regular setting. The back carries no stones at all. The head, the body and the feet are hollowed instead into rows of small four-lobed cells, each row divided by a polished ridge, while the arms and the backs of the ears stay plain. Held up to the light, the two faces of the same casting do opposite things with it.

When the plain side comes round

A small swivel clasp sits third in the chain that links the keys to the bear, after the large lobster clasp and the flat split ring, before the jump ring, and its barrel is made to turn. On a strap that means the plain back swings into view every so often, which is not a fault so much as a second thing to look at. The bow is unaffected either way: it stands proud of the body rather than lying against it, so the red catches the eye from the side as readily as from the front.

The rest of the aisle is easier to judge side by side: what the key chains range holds, in metal and in cloth sits on a single page.

If cloth appeals more than metal, the rabbit keyrings filed one page over gather the tulle and lace versions, built on an altogether different scale.