Yesterday’s clouds produced nothing so much as a break in the pattern: a pair of perfect raindrops upon my skin as the setting sun shone brightly, and a complete bypassing of us by the storms of night.
Today might be another matter.
The dawn was veiled behind a skyful of dove-colored mammatus clouds, faint slivers of blue peeking through here and there through the puffy bands of white, but within minutes they had resolved themselves into a full canopy of varying shades of gray. Now, the heavy dark blue thunderheads are coalescing behind the northeast peaks, while smaller, paler versions of their kind stretch around the horizon on all sides.
A look at the radar map suggests a downpour in the light hours of this day, no waiting for fall of dark.
Regardless, the recent weather’s return to historical patterns has been such a welcome development that there are scarcely words for the level of gratitude we feel. Not so very many years ago, we could be assured of at least a little rain virtually every single day of the summer season, and if yesterday’s clouds produced only two drops? Well, it’s still rain, and we’ll count it.
But the incident put me in mind of the perfect #TBT work for this week, one that is a throwback only to the very beginning of this month. It was a work that was, a bit like last week’s, simultaneously commission and gift: a relative who shares a birthday with Wings, who had seen a #TBT post a month prior featuring one of these self-adjustable rings, that one from his first round of them, created some fourteen years ago. She wanted to commission one with stones in her favorite blues, but Wings made it a birthday gift to her instead.
Today’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work is the result, and in retrospect, it seems to manifest as a pair of perfect raindrops itself.
As is customary with this style, Wings created the band of sterling silver half-round “wire,” which, as I’ve explained at length in prior posts, isn’t “wire” at all, as that term is commonly understood. It’s a term of art in metalsmithing for metal purchased in a particular form and shape: melted from ingot and poured into extremely long molds, and, once cooled and released, then cut into the desired lengths for purchase. Molds are shaped in round, half-round, square, flat, triangle, bead, pattern, and twisted or braided forms (and probably more that I’m forgetting at the moment). They’re available in all sorts of gauges, which is a measure of thickness and weight, from blocky segments to the finest filaments. And they are a perfect metal form for creating rings or cuff bracelets with slender bands, either alone or in multiples bound together.
Half-round wire, of course, is just what it sounds like: If you look at a length of it from the end, it looks like a half-sphere, flat on one side and convex on the other.
Convexity, of course, makes stampwork more challenging than if the surface were flat. But Wings has been doing this a very, very long time, and he’s accustomed to working with small and unusually-shaped spaces. After cutting the half-round wire to size and hammering each end flat preparatory in order to hold the bezels later, he set about choosing the stampwork pattern.
In this case, he selected a two-stamp combination that he has grown particularly fond of using: a sinuous flowing-water motif turned into a dancing stalk, topped by a single flowering blossom. He repeated this along the length of the band, connecting each to the next by overlapping the blossoms at either end of each “stalk.” It was a simple, remarkably efficient way of demonstrating the role of the rain here: flowing water from the sky, flowering into drops of rain upon an earth that grows and prospers in response.
Once the stampwork was complete, he gently hammered the wire around a mandrel to the proper size and shape, then placed it in a tiny jeweler’s vise known as “tweezers” for the needle-like clamp on the end, and set about fashioning a single round saw-toothed bezel on the flattened spaces at either end. Then he oxidized the stampwork and joins and buffed it to a medium-high polish.
Buffing complete, all that remained was to set the stones. At the time we discussed the creation of the ring and our friend had requested lapis lazuli, I had trawled through Wings’s inventory to find suitable stones. The only ones in the correct size were far too light; I know our sister’s taste in blues because it’s exactly like my own, and knew that she would want something in the cobalt-to-violet-blue range.
So I placed an order for twenty cabochons in the desired size. With such orders, you never know what you’re going to get until it arrives, and without seeing them in person you can’t choose them yourself (and for calibrated cabs in those sizes, you can’t choose them individually anyway). I wanted a large enough selection to be able to find two of the perfect color and matrix, and Wings will always use the rest in other pieces over the months and years to come.
As the photo at the top shows, the perfect stones were there in the lot: a pair of perfect raindrops, to set into a ring meant to symbolize growth and prosperity and abundance.
That’s a pretty good metaphor for the unexpected gifts we have been granted by this season, too.
~ Aji
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