Victoria jeweller Alex Carey says the mystique surrounding a simple metal bracelet his grandfather, John Carey, designed in the 1960s is inexplicable beyond its brushes with fame.

"There's literally a line-up of people waiting to buy them outside his studio in Cape Cod every day," Carey, 34, tells me at his shop, Adore Jewellery on Pandora Avenue, where he continues making his family's designs as well as his own. "I haven't gotten there yet, but we've had a lot of orders in the past few weeks."

The latest rush of orders is likely due to the bracelet's most recent brush with fame. On the July 5 episode of the reality show The Bachelorette, contender Chris Lambton gave bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky Cape Cod's famous bracelet, telling her his sister and recently departed mother were big fans.

"Chris is a friend of the family. He saw my grandfather in the coffee shop and said 'You should watch the Bachelorette this week. Your bracelet is on it,' " Carey says. Fans and critics of the reality show say the move likely catapulted Lambton from backbencher to front-runner.

Lambtom was one of two bachelors remaining after last night's show.

It's known as the Cape Cod bracelet, the screwball bracelet, the Dennis bracelet (named for Dennis, Mass., where John Carey lives and his daughter runs his shop, Eden Hand Arts) and even the Lasqueti Island bracelet, where Alex Carey's parents settled in the 1970s and raised their three kids.

Whatever it's called, the bracelet leads back to the Carey family and tells their story.

"I call it the Cape Cod screwball bracelet," John Carey, 90, tells me from his home. "What more could a father ask for than to see his children and their children continue his work? It's the greatest honour."

He designed the bracelet in the 1960s for a woman who came into the shop he shared with his wife, Eve Carey, an accomplished potter and artist.

"A local lady came in and said she wanted a bracelet her daughter couldn't lose," Carey says. "I looked up every kind of hook from the Etruscans to the London Museum."

Carey created a simple silver band with a threaded screwball clasp to custom-fit an individual wrist. The bracelet became popular among the small, tight-knit Cape Cod community and, soon after, a draw for the hordes of tourists coming through from Boston and New York.

"It started when the whole swim club got one as a gift," Carey says. "Then pretty much everyone had a mother or sister with a bracelet. They're classy, they're comfortable and they don't fall off."

In the 1990s, actor Amy Jo Johnson wore the bracelet for much of her time on the 1990s TV series, Felicity, and its popularity reached new heights.

"All of a sudden high school girls were after them," Alex Carey says, adding women of all ages remark that they rarely take the bracelets off. "There's an emotional tie to them I can't explain."

In late 1960s Carey's newlywed parents left Massachusetts in a Volkswagen van in search of adventure.

"They went to Woodstock and travelled around, ending up in San Francisco and, by fluke, Lasqueti Island," Carey says.

The couple meant to visit a friend for a day, but didn't consider the Lasqueti Island foot passenger ferry only ran a few times a week. They ended up staying indefinitely, receiving donated land in the Island's first co-operative, buying a mobile sawmill, having their eldest son in the teepee they called home and two children after that.

"It was a wonderful place to raise small kids in. I definitely romanticize it," Carey says. His parents moved to Parksville when the kids entered their teens.

There, Carey's dad set up shop to make jewelry and produce the screwball bracelets, sending them all to Cape Cod to help the elder John Carey with increasing demand.

After working as a commercial fisherman and on the oil rigs in Alberta, Alex Carey decided to spend a spring helping grandfather make jewelry in Cape Cod. He ended up staying for three years.

"I realized it was something I'd be interested in doing, especially continuing the family tradition," he says. He enrolled at the American Jewelers Institute in Portland, Oregon. But when his father passed away suddenly in 2001, Carey took over the family business in Parksville, teaching his sister the trade and supplying at least 50 per cent of his grandfather's Cape Cod store.

In 2004, Carey and his wife decided to move to Victoria. He continued making the screwball bracelets in the basement of a rented house, but making ends meet was tough.

After a summer of running heavy duty machinery in an open-pit coal mine in northamyern B.C., he decided he needed a shop of his own.

Adore Jewellery opened just over a year ago. In addition to his own work, Carey sells jewelry by local designers at an average price point of $100. Among some of the most intriguing: Honor Cienska, one of the founders of the popular Shi Studio line, has ventured into jewelry made from recycled decorative Chinese tins and chopsticks, Melissa McCrosky makes jewelry with humane and eco-friendly real butterflies and Angela Newman's interchangeable rings are inventive and fun.

The store also serves as Carey's workshop. Drop by and you might catch him melting silver grains, punching out gold beads or beating silver bands stiff with a dog bone mallet - all part of the Carey family ritual to make their famous screwball bracelet.

"A guy came in recently, watched me and said, 'When I was growing up in England, my father used to take me to the cobbler to watch my shoes get made. Seems jewelry is the only profession you can still do that,'" Carey tells me. "I like being part of keeping that tradition, my family's tradition even more."

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

A video clip from the Bachelorette can be found here

© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist