Despite the chill edge to the air, today finally feels a bit like spring.
It’s still cold, and no mistake, but the wind this day is not too much more than a breeze, and it doesn’t hold the bitter, wintry edge of recent days. The sky is a cloudless, perfect blue, the land awash in sunlight, and it’s possible to believe that there just might be some truth to the official forecast, which predicts highs in the seventies for the first of next week.
Today’s conditions, though, were born in the overnight hours, a product of clearing night skies and a calming of the winds, a time of the setting of the full amber moon and the next round in what is, each day, a dance of sun and guiding stars.
And last night they were abundant, from Evening Star ascendant and rise of the full moon to the latter’s rest and a final watch kept by the Morning Star: brilliant diamonds, twinkling long-distance, a silvery kaleidoscope of constellations and sky spirits that watch over us, guide us, help us find out place in world and cosmos alike, all wrapped in the beauty that is their medicine and power.
So it should come as no surprise that of the two works I was contemplating for this week’s #TBT feature, I chose the one pictured above. It’s a throwback to somewhere between eleven and fifteen years ago: created between 2008 and 2012, it was one in Wings’s revival, and intermittent series, of an old classic style, a wristband of rich leather strung with old-style traditional conchas to dance along its full length. This one, if memory serves, had an old-fashioned silver-snap closure, with a single giant, industrial-sized rivet-style snap; some of the others featured ranger-style buckle closures. All have always been made of high-quality leather in various colors, beveled or scored by hand, sometimes stamped intermittently between conchas, and always, always, strung with Wings’s signature silverwork.
This one, if I had to guess, probably dates back to 2009, but it could have been anywhere in the broader range, and of course, Wings has created them before and since that time, as well. But this one was special: The band was a thick, rich brown leather, at once weathered and still glowing, and Wings scored a deep border down either side of it. There are, of course, leatherworking tools for such tasks, but he simply adapts his metalworking stamps — in this case, using a short, plain chisel-end stamp, and repeating it over and over all the way down the length of the band, first inside one edge, then inside the other. The difference is in the choice of hammer: Where it often requires a 5-pound solid steel hammer to incise a series of scoremarks into one deep, cohesive line in sterling silver, a mallet with a rolled-leather head will work for less-resistant materials like leather. The lighter weight of the strike prevents the stamp from piercing through the leather, too — or, at least, it does with experience, and Wings has plenty of that.
I can’t recall definitively, at this late date, exactly how many conchas were strung on this particular band, but if memory serves, it was six total. Four are visible in the photo, and there wold have been at least one more, even for the smallest wrist; for this particular concha size, six seemed to provide the best proportions and spacing. [For longer, custom wristbands, of course, he’s created versions with more than six conchas; length is always key to proportion, because don’t want the conchas sitting on top of each other, but you also don’t want large gaps between them.]
These were made of probably eighteen-gauge sterling silver, possibly one gauge either side of that (i.e., sixteen- or twenty-gauge). It’s a range of weight and thickness that’s conducive to creating conchas: lightweight enough to form them easily into their classic domed shape, but heavy enough not to bend beyond that strategic, intentional shaping. Each is cut into a perfect circle, filed smooth on the edges and laid flat on his workbench. Then, he begins laying out the stampwork design.
In this case, Wings chose a traditional Morning Star motif for the center, ringed with the rays of a rising sun. [It’s also a design that could be seen as signifying the day’s opposite end: the appearance of the first Evening Star inside the rays of a setting sun.] But this is not an ordinary Morning Star motif; this is one created by hand from a single tiny hoop stamped at the very center, with the four elongated spokes formed of one stylized triangular point, radiant angles above an open base, with those bases paired to create long diamond shapes. In other words, each of the four spokes is made of a pair of that one point symbol, conjoined at their open bases, meaning that the point is repeated eight times throughout each star sign.
Once the central star symbols were complete, Wings turned to the border work of each concha. He chose an extended sunrise motif, one with serrated rays beneath a deep arc, and ringed them around each concha a few millimeters from the edge: eight sunrise stamps per concha. Then, he turned each one over, added his hallmark, and domed it lightly in the traditional way, repoussé-fashion (a fancy French metalsmithing term that simply means “from the reverse”). The word concha is the Spanish word for “shell,” and it’s that shell-like domed shape that gives the technique and design their name. A piece of silver like this is only a concha if it’s shaped in this way; if it’s flat, it’s simply a medallion.
Doming complete, one more task related to the reverse of each concha remained: to create and solder the flat loops that would hold the conchas on the band itself. Such loops tend to be a perhaps a quarter-inch wide, the length sized between the width of the band and the distance across the underside edges of the conchas. They are cut freehand of a lighter-weight gauge of sterling silver, soldered on the underside, and once the band is strung through them, they are clamped at the center.
Before that, though, Wings would have oxidized their joins and all the stampwork on the front, then buffed them to a medium-high polish. In the meantime, he punched the snap halves into the ends of the band, then cleaned up any stray bits of leather on the beveled edges and ends. Once complete, he strung each concha individually onto the band, separated them to the proper spacing, and pressed the loop inward at the center on the back of each to hold it in place. Then he gave it final hand-buffing to remove any fingerprints, blessed the piece, and put it into inventory for sale.
I no longer recall who bought this particular wristband, nor most of the others from that period, although I have the purchasers of his more recent versions solidly in my memory. They’re a popular design, less expensive than cuffs , with an old-school look that appeals to all ages, regardless of gender. And wearing them feels a bit like having the guidance of the stars always at hand.
The clarity of the afternoon sky — once common to spring here, until the trickster winds overtook the season and filled the air with dust — tells me that the stars will be out in force tonight. While the glow of the moon, now ever so slightly on the wane, will dim their radiance for a time, the moments just after sunset and again just before sunrise will again bring us a dance of sun and guiding stars, a bit of beauty and medicine with which to end, and begin, each day.
~ Aji
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