As of this morning, our small world here has returned very nearly to full autumn clarity. A faint silver haze of smoke still drifts upon the air, but the only thing distinguishing it from ordinary seasonal smoke from local woodstoves and fireplaces is the darker pall near the western horizon. Still, the skies are at long last fully blue overhead, the bright jeweled blue of turquoise opening like the petals of a cosmic cornflower.
The days have come alive once more with all the crisp, clear energy of early fall beneath a wildflower sky.
The radiant blue puts me in mind of today’s featured work, a throwback, if memory serves, to this very time of year some dozen years ago. It was a simpler form of a design Wings had created a few months previously: a thirteen-stone cactus blossom center atop a small silver buckle. The first iteration had been both larger and more elaborate, its upper surface entirely covered in clean, deep, stunning freehand stampwork. This was one of three, if I remember correctly, each set with turquoise, but smaller in size and each with its own much simpler, more spare design.
It began with the silverwork, with the buckle itself. He cut it freehand from solid sheet silver of a fairly substantial gauge, heavy enough to bend under the weight of the setting but still lightweight enough not to fall forward when strung on the belt. He rounded the corners, filed the edges smooth, then turned it over to add his hallmark. He shaped it gently around a mandrel to give it the slight arc necessary for it lie properly at the waist, then turned it over again to add the pick and loop.
Then it was time to focus on the buckle’s front surface.
As I noted previously, Wings had earlier created a more elaborate buckle in a similar cactus-blossom motif that had featured, for the first time ever, thirteen stones — one large round center cabochon of Sleeping Beauty turquoise ringed by a full dozen small round “petal’ cabochons, each from the same mine source. [You can see that buckle in the second photo in this post.] That buckle, and its near-immediate sale to someone for whom the number thirteen held great (and lucky) resonance, inspired him to create a simpler, less expensive version. Today’s work was the result.
The focal accent at the center was slightly different; it still consisted of the same pattern of thirteen stones, bezel-set onto one solid backing large enough to hold them all. But the backing for this one, eventually fused to the buckle using overlay techniques, was scalloped on the edges instead of smooth, each scallop following the line of the stones.
And they were extraordinary stones:
The center was a spectacularly clear, smooth orb of Sleeping Beauty turquoise, set right at the very center. Arrayed around it, with all the faint unevenness that accompanies the opening of a flower, they were deeply hued. The photo at top makes them appear green, but the second photo shows them more true to their actual shades, and while I would have thought it most likely that such a sizeable collection of small cabs would be either Kingman or Royston, these actually appeared to be Bisbee.
That’s unusual; Bisbee is rarely found in such small cabochons. It’s now considered a rare turquoise, the mine having been closed for many years, and such stone as remains is usually cabbed into relatively large pieces, often with plenty of the red-brown siltstone matrix that gives certain varieties its “smoky” nickname.
But these tiny cabochons were OLD. They were a part of Wings’s personal collection of turquoise cabochons, which to this day is large and varied and consists of an extraordinary mix of sizes and shapes, colors and matrices, mine sources and degree of lapidary work. And these hold all of the Bisbee hallmarks: deep, intense sky blue, mulberry-colored siltstone matrix in webs and whorls, and a dusky glow to them that is some of the best that that mine has always had to offer.
Prior to setting the highly-domed cabochons into their saw-toothed bezels, he oxidized the settings fairly heavily, then buffed the buckle to a mirror finish. All that remained was to set the stones. Arrayed around the clear center cabochon, manifest along a spectrum of color and a slightly irregular placement, they really did look like the petals of a flower: in these sharp, crisp days of early fall, a wildflower sky.
And someone now possesses a buckle sold far below market value, one set with some of the most beautiful of the Skystone’s jeweled blues.
~ Aji
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