A “warmer world” is not, by itself, necessarily a good thing, although we are getting it anyway and have been for some time now. Global warming is one of the fundamental features of climate change, every year now seems to surpass the last as the hottest on record. We are certainly on track for record heat already this year: The winter just ended was the warmest anyone can remember (and the driest, too), and on this third day of spring, the mercury has shot well past seventy.
I said yesterday that it was too early for the spirits of the warmer winds. I was wrong. We saw the first butterfly of the year at midday today, a small mourning cloak spiraling happily past on the gentle currents. The winds have risen since, a perfect blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds now mostly gray and lowering, but the underlying temperature remains unseasonably warm, and I have been doing outside chores with both arms and legs bare to our now more thinly-veiled sun.
But the morning skies were glorious, a reminder of just how beautiful life here can be in spring and summer, all turquoise skies and amber light. And it reminded me of a work from early last summer, a perfect throwback for this day.
Every now and then, Wings creates a work that so captures people’s imaginations that we receive multiple inquiries seeking to buy the same one-of-a-kind piece. So it was last year with a particular barrette, one fashioned much like the butterfly that whirled past us earlier today, its body formed from a mysteriously dusky piece of Bisbee turquoise. I posted it to our Accessories Gallery on a day late in May last year, and it sold within minutes — ironically, to a dear friend who is also a friend of our other dear friend who commissioned today’s featured work.
One of the most striking features of the original barrette involved its pick: Instead of the more customary French-clip design, Wings created it with a hole at either end and a sterling silver pick to hold it in place. Instead of a single head for the pick, he soldered a pair of bezel-set malachite cabochons back to back, creating a dual jeweled head. Such a departure captured a great deal of attention, as well, and the friend who commissioned a similar (although obviously not identical) piece sought a similar design.
Our friend had not specified a particular focal stone, nor for the gems in the pick. Knowing that she has a fondness for both turquoise and amber — separately, and together — I chose from a selection of Wings’s then-current inventory of gems, pairing one red-matrixed turquoise cabochon with carnelian and a couple of other turquoise cabs with amber. The one shown above, from Arizona’s Turquoise Mountain mine, was a more suitable size and shape for the barrette, but it had the added advantage of color and matrix: It was a classic sky-blue stone, tightly webbed matrixed with both delicate pale webbing and bold patches of warm golden-bronze and copper colors. The matrix turned out to be a near-perfect match to a pair of small round amber cabochons, their hardened resin also matrixed deep within, giving them the look of small fiery suns. Our friend chose that combination, and Wings set to work.
It began, as always, with the silver, although in this case, the barrette would — at least in terms of size and shape — be built around the already-preselected stones. Wings elected to follow the original design fairly closely, given that part of what attracted our friend to the original barrette was its graceful, vaguely butterfly-like shape. To accommodate the somewhat larger focal cabochon, he expanded the “rays” on its “wings” from four to five per side, radiating them outward from the center at lightly flared angles. He scalloped the edges and, at top and bottom, added a bracketing scalloped design.
Once the outlines were set, Wings began the stampwork. First, he set the focal stone atop the silver at the very center — loosely, without a bezel, purely for the sake of determining the placement of the stampwork. He then chose a sunrise symbol and repeated it in a circle all the way around the center where the stone would eventually lie. Using the outer edge of the sunrise “corona” as a starting point, he then took a plain chisel and hand-scored each of the five “rays” on either wing outward to what would become their scalloped edges. He then chose a finer, narrower version of the sunrise symbol and stamped it in a repeating pattern at the end of each “ray” on the wings.
At this point, the barrette was ready to cut out of the sheet silver. Using a tiny jeweler’s saw, he carefully excised it from the surrounding silver, keeping movement of the blade smooth and even, so that the scalloped ends of the wings would be uniform, and the arcs of the bracketing scallops at top and bottom would be graceful and elegant. Then he carefully drilled a single hole at the end of the center “ray” in each wing and filed their edges smooth. These holes would hold the pick, which would keep the wearer’s hair in place.
Then he turned the barrette over and gently domed it from the reverse to create the proper arc. At the same time, he chose a very slender piece of sterling silver round wire, cut it to length, and hand-filed one end to a point. This would serve as the pick.
At this point, neither barrette nor pick was complete; both were missing their focal stones. The pick was, in relative terms, simple: He fashioned a pair of sawtoothed bezels, cut out a matching circle of sheet silver of a fairly substantial gauge, and soldered the bezels back to back with the round silver medallion sandwiched between them to provide sturdiness and support. He then soldered this three-piece end to the unfiled end of the pick.
The focal stone for the barrette would require a bit more work. Because such barrettes must be domed slightly to hold the wearer’s hair in place, the barrette necessarily slopes downward from the center. This means that, save for cabochons small enough to fit within what little of the surface remains flat at the very center, the bezel cannot be soldered directly onto the surface of the barrette: The gradient on either side, combined the microscopic yawing motion that occurs with adjustment of the barrette, will loosen the solder eventually, and both bezel and stone are at risk of being lost.
Fortunately, Wings has long experience with this particular phenomenon, and he adapted a solution that he uses regularly with anticlastic bracelets and domed concha-style pieces. He took a piece of slender sterling silver tubing, cut it to a vanishing short length, and set it upright on the center of the barrette’s surface. Once the tube was soldered firmly into place, he created a bezel, with a sturdy, solid back cut to the free-form triangular shape of the stone. The backing was slightly larger than the stone, and extended minutely beyond the saw-toothed bezel soldered to its surface. Around this exposed edge, he soldered a delicate strand of twisted silver. Then he oxidized both barrette and pick, including the bezels, and buffed them all to a near-mirror sheen.
Finally, it was time to set the stones. The two amber cabs, bright sunny orbs in the color of the dawn light, he place securely into either side of the pick. The Turquoise Mountain cab, one that looked itself like a dawn desert sky flaring out into silvery light, he placed securely into the elevated bezel atop the barrette itself. Once complete, he made minor adjustments to the curvature of the barrette, inserted the pick, and blessed the piece for our friend before shipping.
I thought of this piece earlier today as I gazed out at the early-morning sky, brilliant turquoise with patches of coppery clouds, their edges backlit by an amber sun spilling silver light across a greening earth. It was a chance to watch the sun at work, lighting up a warmer world. It was also a chance to revel for a moment in that warmth and light.
~ Aji
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