It’s ever so slightly cooler today, with forecast that suggests our highs will continue to drop over the next two weeks. Fifteen days out, we might actually see temperatures that we might consider normal — for, say, the latter part of September.
But at least they’re dropping. After the oppressive heat of the last few days, that’s a gift in itself.
Part of it is no doubt due to the presence of clouds — nothing drastic, no cover, just puffs of white scattered across the open sky, some of them turning now to thunderheads in the distance. They won’t hold any rain for us, but it’s a drastic change from yesterday’s stark unbroken blue, the only marring of the hot desert sky the presence of a pall of smoke from multiple sources: California wildfires, prescribed burns in neighboring areas, the local high school’s homecoming bonfire . . . and last night, a giant plume just west of us from a fire that destroyed a local family’s home and vehicles, with no word yet on identity or status of survivors. It’s the third such fire in recent weeks, and it’s tempting to suspect a firebug, since we’ve had that evil here locally in the past.. But the truth of the matter is that it’s more likely to be an electrical fault or some other ignition source in old structures at a time when, for too much of the local population, maintenance is prohibitively expensive [as is housing; for locals, it’s reach crisis proportions, while wealthy colonizers continue to buy up properties at a seemingly impossible rate and then leave them empty, save for the occasional Air B&B tourist, while local families are forced onto the streets].
Along with the cooler air comes the more rapid change of cooler on peaks and slopes, too. It began a whole month earlier than usual this year, but remarkably, it’s also stayed around a lot longer, and so we have the brilliant gold of the aspen line one all the surrounding mountains still. It makes for a beautiful sight, particularly at dawn and dusk, the fall sun setting the earth alight.
It’s a reminder that much in this world is often more beautiful than we know. If you look at those same peaks at night, they’ll appear simply dark, the uniform blue-black of shadow. Even in the daylight hours, when the sun does not fall directly on them, they seem duller, earthy, somehow less worthy of notice. But the fire is there; it just needs the right light to bring it out, and someone to be paying attention to appreciate it.
This week’s #TBT featured work reminds me of that disconnect between what we see and what is actually there. It’s a throw back only to the first of July, some three months ago, and a commission by someone very dear to us. She has quite a collection of Wings’s work across several categories — necklaces, bracelets, earrings — but she has amassed a serious collection of bespoke hair cuffs. They’re really what they sound like: small curved arcs of [here, at least] sterling silver, adorned with stampwork, millwork, a stone, or some combination thereof, and with a pick soldered into the apex of the arc on the reverse. A ponytail holder is wrapped around the pick, and around the wearer’s braid of lock of hair, and the cuff is positioned over the front of it.
In late spring/early summer, our friend commissioned a group of five separate hair cuffs from Wings:
She had asked me to trawl through Wings’s inventory of cabochons with an eye toward single smaller stones that were unique, suitable in size and shape for this purpose, and in the materials and colors that I know she prefers. That last was easy, because our tastes in color and stone are very similar. And as it turned out, Wings had a substantial collection of cabochons in smaller sizes and suitable shapes, most of them distinctive in their own ways.
So I took photographs of some two dozen or so and sent them to her. She chose the five stones that appear in the photo immediately above [azurite in malachite, denim lapis, Koroit opal, ultra-high-grade Royal Web variscite, and royal lapis lazuli]. We featured the denim lapis one in this space a few weeks ago, here; the other will follow over time. But this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work is the one that appears on the far left, the hair cuff set with the Koroit opal.
This shot, showing the hair cuff from the side, actually gives a good view of the stone as it looks in most lights. It’s a rich collection of browns, slightly mottled in appearance, with a high polish to the surface. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
First, I want to talk about the cuff itself.
The hair cuffs are made of sheet silver, wrought of a gauge heavy enough to hold their shape without any risk of bending, but lightweight not to tip forward when worn, nor to weigh down the wearer’s hair. No one wants to feel as though heavy metal is pulling on their locks or braids, after all. Sizes range from probably roughly 1.5″ inches high and wide to perhaps as much as 2.5″, depending on the size wanted. This one was about 2″ high by roughly 1-3/4″ wide, although once shaped, its domed form was some 3/4″ across. the cabochon was 5/8″ high by 9/16″ across at its widest point, and Wings extended the bezel backing a couple of millimeters beyond it on all sides to frame it properly.
As you can see from the group photo, he very often uses stampwork to create the design, but in this instance, he chose millwork. The silver is hand-cranked through a rolling mill — hard, heavy labor even with smaller pieces — with the silver placed against a metal template during the rolling process to transfer the design. This particular design is one that looks like the earth, layered, on a topographical map . . . or, around here, like the earth itself, in sandstone formations and certain other materials that manifest in layers eroded by wind and weather and time.
Once rolled, the surface design work was complete, so after adding his hallmark on the reverse, he shaped it around a mandrel to the proper [and steep] arc.
The pick inside is not added until the arc is shaped to the proper degree. Once that task is finished, he cuts a length of sterling silver “wire” [again, that’s silver melted from ingot, poured into exceedingly long commercial molds of various shapes, sizes, and designs, then cooled, cut to very long lengths and sold, generally, by the foot.
For this one, he chose what’s known as “pattern wire” in an alternating design consisting of three concave ovals with the space between also sculpted out slightly, alternating with convex segment adorned with small parallel diagonal lines incised into the surface. It’s commercially done, and it has a distinctly Art Deco feel to it, but it always makes me think of the “dot/dash” locution used to describe Morse code.
Here, Wings cut a length just slightly longer than the cuff itself, then cut one end by hand into a sharp point, and filed the edges smooth. He kept the edge of the opposite end straight, then bent it over backwards by hand, just a few sixteenths of an inch, and pressed it tightly to the rest of the pick. He centered what remained, then soldered the overlapping section to the top end of the inner cuff, pressing the pointed end downward toward the silver. The difference in thickness at each end provides room for tension, allowing the pick to hold the ponytail holder and the hair securely.
Then he turned it right side up again, and set about creating the bezel for the stone.
For this cabochon, a freeform teardrop of sorts whose irregular sides created a slightly offset effect, he chose to create a plain, heavy, low-profile bezel, with the backing extended just the slightest bit. That provided a more stable base; sometimes, if the stone is wide enough, it has to be elevated slightly above the cuff to prevent solder fracture along the curvature, but there was just enough flat space at the center of the cuff to permit him to place this one directly on it.
Once the bezel was complete, all that remained was to oxidize the surface millwork and the pick and buff it to a richly aged Florentine finish, then set the stone.
But I want to talk about that stone for a moment. I alluded to what made it special above, but I want folks to be able to see the difference.
Koroit opals are found solely in Australia, and I’ve written about them here before:
You will see it called “Koroit opal,” “boulder opal,” “matrix opal,” etc., all shorthand versions that omit aspects of its true identity. It’s a form of opal, often brilliant cobalt blue, as is the case here, that includes into the local host rock in a part of what have become known, colonially, as “the opal fields” of Australia. Wikipedia and multiple other colonial sources will tell you that the stone is named for the Koroit region of Australia, but that’s only a half-truth, and a half-story into the bargain. The town of Koroit, named for the Indigenous people of the area that colonial descriptions now seek and seem to erase entirely, the Koroit Gundidj is located near the southern shore of what is now called western Victoria. The “Koroit opal fields,” by contrast, are further northeast, landlocked in Queensland. The town is sited in a place of volcanic geology and geography, while the mines to the north are mostly a mix of sedimentary materials such as sandstone and ironstone, and there, the opal material has included over time on an epochal scale into the brecciated layers, setting it alight with blue flash and fire (as well as other shades, too).
This one is not an example of brecciated host rock, but it is classic Koroit host rock: shades of rich brown, slightly marbled and whorled with the opal having included into and formed those whorls deep in the stone. Sometimes, all that’s visible are the circular outlines, particularly if the stone is in shadow, as it appears in the image immediately above. It’s a beautiful brown, and those lighter orb-like inclusions are luminous, but they still seem more like the host rock itself.
And then there’s what happens when you catch the sunlight with the stone:
This photo was shot in the exact same spot . . . with the studio door opened to the brilliant rays of the setting sun. You can clearly see how those rounded, pillow-like inclusions come alight. It doesn’t render well on-screen, but in real life, the center of the stone was alive with brilliant red and orange and green flash, refracting the sun’s medicine back out into the world around it.
That’s what I meant earlier about the disconnect between what we see and what is actually there, about how so much of our world is beautiful, but it need the light to bring it out and someone attuned enough to notice it.
As I’ve been writing, amid frequent interruptions, I’ve been proven wrong on nearly guess about today’s conditions. The cooler air was suffocated in the grip of a mercury well past the eighty-degree mark once more. The clouds I mentioned, those distant thunderheads gathering to the east? They whipped themselves up into a full-scale storm over the peaks, and when their cold air hit our oppressively hot atmosphere, it generated enough wild winds to deliver a few scattered drops even to us . . . accompanied by various dust devils, rolls of thunder, and even a light and momentary rainbow.
This is the season of the fall sun setting the earth alight. Sometimes, it’s aided by other elemental spirits, too. And sometimes, they’re as concerned with creating mischief as with creating beauty.
~ Aji
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