Some days, nothing goes as planned.
Today was one of those days, just really getting under way when one of our horses colicked. Badly.
This is Miskwaki (“Red Earth,” in my language, for his red-and-white paint horse coat), our easy horse. He was a rescue, hovering near death when he found his way to our land nine and a half years ago, and once we dealt with the starvation and the deadly dehydration and the thousands-of-ticks infestation and all the other ills that attend a horse who has been left abandoned to die, he became the easiest of the whole herd, once six or seven strong. Now it’s just him and Miika, and Miika is more than enough work for both of them, so we have always been grateful for our red paint boy’s overall good health.
Apparently, when he finally did get sick, it was a doozy.
So we have spent the entire day in 90+-degree heat, walking him, syringing him, walking him, comforting him, walking him, worrying over him, walking him, hholding him for the vet to tube him repeatedly over three visits, walking him . . . . And yes, everything is late today.
The irony is that for this week’s #TBT feature, I had already settled on this work well in advance — at the end of last week, as it happens, because I try to plot out the week’s themes and subjects over the eekend prior. And here we are, with a #Throwback Thursday work that dates back only to the first day of August, set with a jewel in the exact colors of the horse who has been our entire focus this day: red and white, with hints of brown edging the flames of the red . . . and a spirit [normally] full of a fire as bright and playful as quicksilver light.
For this moment, we have a fiery sunset sky and await the glow of moon and stars, not so far off now. And we keep watch.
This piece, though? This one has it all: earth and air and fire and water, all the elemental forces that keep our world alive and spinning. We have had plenty of air and fire combined these recent days, with unseasonal highs in the mid-nineties, all the more oppressive now for their earlier absence; this is not Indian summer, but climate catastrophe well under way. The earth itself has already begun to suffer anew beneath this vaunted dry heat, but supposedly the rains will return briefly tomorrow.
This work seems to hold them all, and whole worlds besides: a night sky for this threshold season, with the smoky sunset flames against crescent moon and shooting stars and the tidal pull of the planets that keeps everything together.
This was a special commission from a dear friend, one for whom Wings has created a number of hair cuffs like this in a variety of styles and stones over the yeas. This one was born of an earlier post, when our friend saw the work featured here yesterday, with its stunning Bird of Paradise agate focal cabochon. She asked me whether he had any more of that material in his inventory of stones; it turns out that he had two or three cabochons, each manifest in very different patterning. The closest to the one in the cuff bracelet was this one, with clearly delineated bands of whorls of flame-colored reds amidst the light and dark of the rest of the stone. So she asked him to create a hair cuff that would suit this stone, and this week’s #TBT work is the result.
But if the conceptualization began with the stone, the execution began with the silver. That’s usually the case; even if a given stone is preselected, the metal has to be formed first to fit it. In this case, it involved designing a rectangle of sheet silver sized to accommodate the size of the cabochon, sufficiently heavy to hold the stone but not so heavy that it would pull unduly on her hair. Once he had the size and shape set, he turned to the stampwork.
He began by scoring a border all the way around the rectangle, using a plain, short chisel-end stamp, freehanding it the whole way. Once the border was set, a few millimeters from the edge on all four sides, he took a large flowing-water stamo, one that he made himself by hand, and incised flowing diagonals across the center; in the image above, you can see one of them emerging on the lower right of the image from beneath the bezel.
Next he chose a stylized triangular point, one that serves variously as an arrowhead, a directional motif, perhaps the point of a flame or the waves of wind and water. This he chased in loosely alternating lines across the center of the sivler, inside the border and between the flowing diagonals. It evoked the feel of water, but also of fire, and once the hair cuff was shaped, it would also create a floating effect, as though it, and cuff itself, were being held aloft on wind and light. He elected to add one more signifier of the forces deep space and the spirits of the light: crescent moons edged around the border on all sides, deep arcs the set off the rest of the design.
Once the stampwork was complete, he turned it over to add his hallmark, then shaped it gently around a mandrel until it was at the proper arc.
Then it was time to make the piece functional.
A hair cuff is an arc designed to curve around a ponytail strand, braid, or other lock of hair. Thte ponytail holder or other tie attaches to a prong inside its inner arc, with tension holding it in place. Wings created this one of a slender trand of sterling silver pattern wire, molded in a graceful Art Nouveau floral pattern worthy of Alphonse Mucha (and, indeed, looking much like the floral borders of his famous posters). Wings cut it to size, shaped one end into a tight half-loop, and filed the other to a point. Then he soldered the loop end carefully, and tightly, to one end of the inside of the cuff, only millimeters below the edge, The pointed end is pressed inward and falls just shy of the edge, and it is this that holds the hair in place.
And from the imge above, you can see how deep the stampwork on the outer surface was, with significant displacement of the silver.
Then it was time to fit the stone to it.
By this point, Wings had already created the bezel and backing, the latter extending the smallest bit beyond the scalloped walls of the former, to accommodate a slender strip of twisted silver to edge it. He then created the tiniest of tubes, wroght of sterling silver and cut vansihingly short. Clamping the cuff in a tiny jeweler’s vise (known colloquially as “tweezers” for its pointy ends), he soldered the tube into the very center of the cuff; after it was cooled and set, he soldered the bezel atop it.
Why? To prevent fracture.
Look at the photos. You can see that the edges of the bezel extend beyond the arc on the sides, and that the arc itself slopes deeply away. You cannot solder a bezel of this sort diretly onto it; the ensuing yaw in the spaces between will eventually crack the solder, risking loss of bezel and/or stone. So you elevate it, and then the cuff can be adjusted as needed with no danger to the focal cabochon.
And it’san extraordinary cabochon: swirling bands of red and brown and gray and black interspersed here and there with bits of translucent quartz and an icy white oval on one side. It looks like earth in waters; it looks like whole galaxies in a deep illumianted cosmos. It seems to bubble with activity deep within the stone, and it’s perfect for the stampwork against which it is set.
And it reminds me of Miskwaki, our autumn horse: of Red Earth and a spirit like fire, as bright and playful as quicksilver light.
~ Aji
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