KidooLand Christmas Fair 02/12/2018: Sea Riviera Jewellery

KidooLand will be holding an inaugural Christmas Fair on Sunday 2nd December from 10h30 to 15h30!

Please let us know you are coming by SIGNING UP HERE

- it helps us enormously for planning ;-)

KidooLand's traditional English Christmas Fair, will be full of activities for children, plenty of stands selling lots of different Christmas gifts and a variety of Christmas decorations. We also hope to be able to draw on the best of French Christmas culture by offering vin chaud for Mums and Dads and crepes for hungry tummies of any age!

Over the next 3 weeks, in the run up to our inaugural Christmas Fair, we'll be introducing you to our various partners. First up is is Rhonda Nicholl to tell you a little about her new jewellery company, Sea Riviera.

Welcome to Sea Riviera !

We’re a very young company (less than 1 year old!), composed of Rhonda and Rénald, an Irish-French couple based in Nice. We create jewellery using sea glass that we find on the beaches in the Cote d’Azur. Our aim is to create jewellery that retains the natural beauty of sea glass – this means minimal interference with the glass.

For us, the sea is a wonderful, restorative place. We wanted to share that magic, by creating unique jewellery and items using natural materials from the sea.

Our focus lies around creating unique jewellery using sea glass that we source locally in the Cote d'Azur. Sea glass is glass that has been broken down in the sea over hundreds of years (I think every single child who grew up in the South of France has at least a couple of pieces of ‘sea treasure’ in their own house!)

How we got started:

My 9-5 job was in commercial anthropology, and I worked remotely, often spending hours at a time on the computer. My partner used to urge me to take a break from the computer screen, and give my head (and back!) a break, so we’d go to the beach after work, collecting plastic* that was tossed on the beach, while at the same time looking for sea glass.

Eventually, with our home nearly buckling under the weight of the sea glass, we decided to start making jewellery with it – doing this gave us a project in common (our 9-5 lives were in very different disciples), so in a way it brought the two of us together and gave us a common passive project.

Our mission is two-fold: reduce and recycle.

For us, the sea was, and continues to be a place of restoration and regeneration. It’s distressing to see the sheer amount of plastic washed up on our local beaches. Our efforts to reduce that amount of plastic are really just a drop in the proverbial ocean, but we’re tireless about it. And simultaneously while trying to reduce the amount of plastic on the beach, we wanted to do something transformative with the tumbled sea glass that we were finding on the beach – creating unique pieces that all had their own stories to tell.

We love sharing our creations with the world, whether that’s via our Etsy store or through local artisan markets in France. With every piece that we create and sell, we try to pass on a message that’s more pertinent than monetary gain – a message of sustainability, recycling, and recreation, embodied and encapsulated in each piece.

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever” Jacques Yves Cousteau

*Plastic represents 95% of the waste on the beaches and on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. There are 1.25 million fragments of microplastics per km2 (almost 4 times more than in the plastic island of the North Pacific). Plastic fragments have been found in all marine turtles in the Mediterranean and in 90% of the world's seabirds- in 1960 this number was only 5%.

Let us know you are coming SIGN UP HERE we need to know for planning ;-)

As mentioned above, this year, we will be using the KidooLand Christmas Fair to support the Mimosa charity. Mimosa was set up as a “kitchen-table charity” on the Riviera three years ago by a team of nine women who have all seen Cancer close up and who share the desire to help make a difference. They raise funds that are then distributed to the local cancer charities. You can listen to the KidooLand Director Antonia Beauvoisin interview Mimosa board members on her podcast HERE

Sunday 2nd December, add the date to your diary now! We look forward to seeing you there...