Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.

Lizzie Borden was born in 1860, but that’s not where her notorious story starts. It starts after her mother dies and her father remarries. The relationship between the stepmother and children—Lizzie and her older sister Emma—was cordial, but very dry. It was not always a peaceful household with disputes about money a repeated issue.

In 1892, the couple would later be the victims of a horrific axe murder. He would be murdered in his sleep, axes blows to the face. Her stepmother would receive one axe swing to the face, followed by more to the back of her head as she lay on the floor. The case wasn’t handled well, from evidence to prosecution, and she was acquitted even though her statements frequently changed or didn’t add up. Acquittal wasn’t enough to cleanse her reputation, though she lived the rest of her life in the same town, an outcast. Mystery is all that we’re left with. There are theories, explanations, but nothing can be for sure. Did she do it?

For this set there was a lot of abstraction in its not so subtle interpretation of the story. Each silver-lined bugle bead is an ode to an axe wound, the rounded silver washer an axe slashing over and over against the wooden chopping blocks. All of it is on .018 flex wire with sterling crimps and boro glass toggles, the bracelet toggle clear, the necklace’s dripping blood red. My final Easter egg is that each strand has 40 “axes,” the pendant making one strand, her father’s, 41.

Inspiring axe earrings from VincaUSA