Inside the Artroom: The Witches’ Shears

Every piece begins with obsession. Meet Stuart, Principal Artist at Alchemy of England.

Some ideas arrive fully formed. Others begin with a glance at the wrong thing at the wrong angle - a sideways look at something ordinary that suddenly refuses to look ordinary anymore.

The Witches’ Shears started that way. A bird’s skull, viewed from the side. The curve of the eye socket, the line of the beak. For most people, that is where it ends. For Stuart, with nearly 40 years of design at Alchemy behind him, it was the beginning of something else entirely.

The Finding of a Fresh Angle

When you have been designing for the same company for nearly four decades, the instinct to find new ground does not dull - it sharpens. Stuart describes a mental library built over those years: a checklist of entry points into mythology, magic, and arcane history, accumulated design by design.

“I was interested with the concept of taking something everyday and ordinary and adding a novel gothic twist. When you’ve been designing for the same company for nearly 40 years you tend to jump on any opportunity to find a fresh angle that might spark new ideas.”

The bird skull offered exactly that. Sideways on, it suggested the finger hole and blade from one half of a pair of scissors. A small thing. But the mental library opened, and the story followed quickly.

The Norns: Weavers of Fate

At the roots of Yggdrasil - the great World Tree at the center of Norse cosmology - three giantesses sit at their endless work. The Norns: Urðr, who holds the past; Verðandi, who shapes the present; and Skuld, who commands the future.

Together they spin and weave the threads of every life - god and mortal alike - into a vast tapestry that stretches without end. One draws out the thread of each existence, measuring its length and weight. Another weaves it into the larger pattern, binding each life to the lives around it.

And then there is the third.

Skuld’s role is the coldest of the three. Her shears - fashioned, in Alchemy’s telling, from the skulls of ravens - are the instrument of finality. They represent the moment a thread is measured and found complete, the point at which a life has run its full length and no further. Not a violent act in the Norse telling, but an inevitable one. The shears are simply the symbol of that inevitability.

“With this one I imagined the three witches/goddesses from Norse mythology who weave the fates of mortal men into a vast endless tapestry, and the tools they might use to do that. The final of the three using a blade or shears to break the thread of a man’s life and end it.”

The pendant is that symbol - held still, frozen at the moment before fate is sealed.

The Making

The Witches’ Shears are handcrafted in blackened pewter - a material that suits the subject. The sharpened raven-beak blades sit against polished pewter handles, the contrast between dark and light playing out in the metal itself, shadow against gleam.

The form follows the logic of the original observation: scissors made strange, made significant, cast in pewter and held permanently at rest. The pendant hangs from a high quality chain with clasp fastener - a still object carrying the weight of a fate that has already been decided.

The Piece

There is a particular kind of design challenge in taking something as familiar as a pair of scissors and making it feel genuinely unsettling. The Witches’ Shears do not rely on shock. The darkness here is quiet, structural - built into the mythology, expressed through the craft, and sealed into the stillness of the piece itself.

Bold, unique, and darkly enchanting, the Witches’ Shears pendant is a statement piece for those who understand that fate was never gentle, and that the most powerful symbols are the ones you did not notice until they noticed you.

SHOP THE WITCHES’ SHEARS

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Inside the Artroom is a series exploring the makers, myths, and methods behind Alchemy’s handcrafted gothic jewelry. Each piece tells a story. This is where those stories begin.