Afternoon, and the wind is rising, but the air remains clear and warm. Only pre-monsoonal clouds, puffy, placid, and perfectly white, are adrift across the blue of a cornflower sky. The earth is still damp from the recent rains, grass bright as jade and beaded with alpine dandelions that glow even more golden in the brilliant sunlight.
Those tiny blooms, and the fragile white blossoms on one of the air trees, are all that we have for flowers yet, but the the true blooming season is still a few weeks away. It’s always an event, a surprise and a gift, too, to see which one will emerge, strong and brave, in first flower before all the rest. I would love to have it be the gladioli, or perhaps the lilies or delphinium that we planted last year, but I suspect they will all be too delicate to withstand the cold May nights. In recent years, the tulips have been the first to open to the light, and I suspect it will be the same again this year.
As the year’s first flower goes, the tulip is a beautiful choice, brightly robed and fairly hardy. The ones we have here happen to be brilliant red, a blend of scarlet and the faint orangey shades of crimson, but when I was a child, we had, it seemed to me then, every color imaginable: red, pink, purple, white, yellow. Today’s featured work seems to capture them all in one radiant bud about to open, a sunlit dewdrop on the first fragile petals, held in place by a cascade of color and light. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
First Flower Necklace
A single sunlit dewdrop summons the new buds to open in first flower. In this wildflower season, Wings brings sun and dew to the newest petals in this necklace wrought in shades of rose and gold and sterling silver. It begins with the pendant, a stunning giant teardrop of mookaite, a perfect bud of dusty roses petals edged in sunny gold, just ready to open for the first time. This extraordinary cabochon is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver, and topped by a tiny round bezel-set citrine cabochon, sun filtered through the dew at dawn. It all hangs from a hand-wrought bail of flared sterling silver, stamped front and back with a single hand-stamped flowering sunburst. The bail hangs over a pair of tiny round ocean jasper beads flanked by small faceted mookaite alternating with ridged barrel beads of bright golden citrine, interspersed throughout the length of the strand with large, silky doughnut rondel and barrel beads of mookaite in mulberry and rose and gold. Each end of the strand is anchored with four round ocean jasper beads flowing into sterling silver findings. Bead strand is 20″ long, excluding findings; pendant, including bail, is another 2.5″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; visible portion of mookaite cabochon is 3/4″ long; citrine cabochon is 3/16″ across; bail hangs 1/4″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Close-up view of pendant shown below.
Sterling silver; mookaite; citrine; ocean jasper
$1,750 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The focal cabochon in this extraordinary piece its itself a phenomenon of the natural world. It’s a form of jasper called mookaite, typically manifest in rich dusty shades of red and yellow, banded and ringed and sometimes blended into shades of purple and gray, as well. But the patterning is just just as typically random (or seemingly so; it’s no doubt a direct result of eons of pressure and heat and water and air in a particular mineralogical environment, but the placement of the pattern appears otherwise random in a polished specimen). That makes this one exceptionally rare in appearance, because it’s rarely, if ever, so symmetrical. And when we first saw a photo of it, we saw the same thing: a bud, just on the verge of opening to the world, and so its name, First Flower, was born even before the piece was more than barely, dimly conceived, nothing more tangible than a creative kaleidoscope of thoughts in Wings’s mind.
It took shape simply, set into a spare bezel that honored its clean lines and graceful lower arc, Wings’s one concession to added adornment the sunlit dewdrop on the bail, a tiny translucent cabochon of golden citrine. It picked up the golden line of that edged the stone’s “petals,” and would eventually do the same for the sunny orbs and barrels of the bead strand that holds it fast. It made for an absolutely dazzling work of wearable art, one that holds at its heart all the hope and promise of the summer season, all its abundant beauty and medicine, too.
This morning, the dawn break across clear bright skies, and there were plenty of sunlit dewdrops to be found. Perhaps in the next week or two, we shall awaken to the first fragile petals, opening to a world of warmth and light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
