Purple and pink card butterfly, Something Special, Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins, London, 1966-7

Purple and pink card butterfly with two metal antennae terminating in pink wooden beads

Given by Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins

Something Special Ltd was a company set up in 1966 by Wendy Ramshaw, her husband, David Watkins, and her cousin Pat Howard. It made flat-pack paper jewels. Wendy made the original models, David produced the art work for printing. At one time there were twenty assemblers employed as outworkers. The work was sold by direct mail, by boutiques in Carnaby Street, and by department stores such as Harrods and John Lewis. It filled a window in the Haymarket premises of the Council of Industrial Design. It was exported to the United States and Japan. It was, wrote Shirley Bury, ‘designed to be cheap, light in weight, fun to wear and ephemeral’. It was ‘in the mainstream of exploratory design, for the possibilities of paper were attracting the attention of both costume and furniture designers’ (‘The Evolution of an Artist-Jeweller’, Wendy Ramshaw, exhibition, V&A, 1982-3). Beatriz Chadour-Sampson notes that Wendy and David acknowledged the benefit they derived from their early experience as entrepreneurs, an experience not common among artist jewellers (David Watkins, Artist in Jewellery, Stuttgart, 2008, pp. 12-13).

This butterfly was one of the lines designed for 'SOMETHING SPECIAL', a successful venture by Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins in London in 1966-7. It has an adhesive strip on the back so that it could be attached to fabric or worn directly on the body.

M.26-2015