The world outside the window is not much conducive to the idea of illumination today. White earth; white sky; the first snow has come and gone, the second is here, with more on the way.
Our world now is pale and cold.
Pale, though, is not so bad, particularly when one considers the alternative of endless night. Cold is relative; compared to the bitter winds of recent days, this still air seems almost mild.
And every now and then, the sun shows itself — unwilling to discard the veil entirely, but seemingly wanting to remind us of its presence. After all, irrespective of weather or season, for Father Sun, every day is a time to shine.
Today’s throwback work is one from the winter, or very nearly so: a throwback only to early November of last year, a commissioned work that was part of a very special order by a good friend for eight separate pieces in different forms and styles. And of the eight items, this was one of my favorites, glowing as it did with a golden chatoyance of pure, mysterious light.
Our friend had embarked upon a particular venture, one that would be limited by time and eventually by circumstance, but that nevertheless necessitated her hiring a staff to help. The eight items were intended, as the venture drew to a close, as thank-you gifts for her staff members, and she gave me a little information about them and what her preferences were with regard to the types of items Wings should create . . . and then the three of us really got down to work.
For purposes of today’s feature, we’ll focus only on the item created for this recipient. She wanted to give this person a pair of earrings, sufficiently bold to be recognizeable as traditionally Native jewelry without being too large, too dangly, or too gaudy in presentation. If memory serves, “warm” was one of the motifs that filtered through her description, and these earrings were the result.
And warm they definitely were; they positively glowed. They were also simplicity itself: a matched pair of medium-sized oval cabochons; minimal stampwork on plain medallions.
It began with the ovals.
Not the cabs, although Wings had already set them aside for this pair. No, the design began with the creation of the oval drops themselves, cut from sheet silver and filed smooth around the edges. They had to be large enough to accommodate the stones, yet still understated enough to fit our friend’s design specifications and to conform to the recipient’s personal taste.
Next, he chose two stamps: one a peaked motif, much like a lodge symbol, containing three rays rising upward; the second, a tiny round hoop. He began with the first, stamping them in a repeating pattern, arrayed next to each other in an oval that tracked the shape of the medallions themselves and created a radiant border millimeters inward from the edges. The result was a bit like a sunburst. Once each “sunburst” was complete, he turned to the tiny hoop-shaped stamp, and struck it at the point where each end of the peaks’ bases met — again, a dozen individual stamps that produced the effect of linking each peaked stamp in an unbroken hoop.
Next, he created a setting in the center of each earring, a silver oval with a saw-toothed bezel. Wings will often choose the saw-toothed variety for stones with steep doming; the more extreme the gradient, the more tightly they need to be held, and bezels with saw-toothed or scalloped edges will typically extend higher up the sides of the cabochon than those with plain edges. Sometimes, though, it’s purely an aesthetic choice. In this instance, I believe it was both: The stones were fairly steeply domed, but the serration along the edge of the bezel also picked up the radiant peaked pattern of the stampwork on the earrings.
Next, Wings drilled a perfect tiny round hole in the top of each medallion; these would hold the wires. Before attaching the wires, though, he oxidized the stampwork, taking care to infuse the aging color deeply into each stamp, then buffed the earrings to a high polish. Then, wires attached, it was time to set the stones.
And the stones were a wholly elemental part of the design.
At the time that Wings created these earrings, he had a substantial inventory of domed oval tiger’s eye cabochons in this particular size — purchase in a lot, as is usual with calibrated stones. They varied fairly widely in color presentation, banding, and chatoyance; all were beautiful, but they were not “matched.” In other words, if you wanted a pair that complemented each other in appearance, you could not simply pick any two at random. And so, before he even began the earrings themselves, we spread them all out on the workbench, and began the process of elimination.
Wings often asks me to help with such tasks. I have the ability, or perhaps the distracting curse, to see extremely subtle variations in color, and it’s helpful when he needs to match stones, either to pair them up, as here, or to create the right contrast with wholly different gems. Based on our friend’s description, we knew that we were looking for cabs that radiated chatoyance, that were infused with the appearance of warmth and light and perhaps a little mystery, as well. That made it easy to discard at least half of the cabochons at the outset; beautiful they may have been, but many of them had fairly muted banding, the lines small or uneven and the backgrounds fairly dark and opaque. In short order, we narrowed it down to less than a handful, and spreading them out side by side, the two that belonged together made themselves known immediately.
They were the essence of cat’s eyes: mysterious, with hidden depths and a swirling surface that changed in and with the light. The golden bands looked like flames rising and falling over the face of a darkened sun. They were powerful, the embodiment of the shifting light of a storm born of fire. And Wings constructed the earrings around their glow.
Once complete, the earrings themselves caught the light: held it, embraced it, reflected and refracted it. They looked like suns, swirling molten orbs at the center, silver light radiating outward to touch the world, and the wearer.
They were illumination itself, a manifestation of personal suns — and a reminder that every moment is a time to shine.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
