Today’s #ThrowbackThursday feature is a very special one: special to me personally, one that is the very embodiment of love.
It’s a piece that contains within its collective symbolism forty-nine hearts — or, if I’m being wholly accurate, ninety-seven hearts in the silverwork and another forty-five or so in the leatherwork. It was also one of the first gifts that Wings gave me, probably the seventh or eighth in literal terms, but one from the very early days of our years together.
It’s one of my most prized possessions.
It’s a concha belt, one that is simultaneously traditional and yet reimagined in his own signature style, and one that embodies one his favorite traditional symbols: the heart. It is, to me, very much an expression of love, and fitting for this week’s themes in several different ways.
Wings’s concha belt in our current inventory, the one featured here yesterday, was designed in a Four Sacred Directions pattern. It’s far from his first use of the motif in a traditional belt, though, and my own, pictured above, was one of the early ones.
It began, as such works usually do, with the conchas themselves: twelve in all, plus a thirteenth to serve as the buckle. Instead of cutting them into ovals, he formed them into rectangles with softened, slightly rounded corners. He kept the overall design simple, beginning by hand-scoring each all the way around, four lines in all, about 3/16 of an inch from the outer edge to create a border. Inside the border, at the center of each concha, he stamped four hearts, each full and rounded, with each humped top aimed toward a cardinal point, the base point of each heart meeting inward at the center. He stamped each deeply and firmly enough to create an instant repoussé effect within the body of each heart itself. When complete, he had twelve iterations of hearts placed to the Four Sacred Directions, as though drawing love inward from and returning it outward to the world. This part of the pattern produced forty-eight hearts.
Then Wings turned his attention to the still-empty borders. He began with a long design that represents water — one that appears to be one long elegantly flowing stamp, but is actually a single tiny stamp in a chased that links together over and over and over again to produce the “flowing water” effect. It’s fine, meticulous, labor-intensive detail work, and he repeated it along forty-eight separate straight sides. Then, he chose a tiny rounded heart stamp and placed one at each of the four corners of each concha, facing outward on a diagonal, producing the effect of the waters flowing into the heart and back out again to link up at the next one. He domed each slightly and soldered the loops firmly to the reverse.
Once these were complete, he moved on to the thirteenth concha, the buckle. He already had a cabochon set aside for its focal point, a brilliant sky-blue cabochon of Arizona turquoise cut and cabbed into its own heart shape. First, however, he scored the silver around the edges to create a border like those on the rest of the belt. However, instead of adding the flowing-water pattern, he began at the center of each side and hand-scored short sharp lines between the inner border and the edge, each line on a diagonal: Those to the left of center were angled leftward; those to the right, rightward. He repeated this pattern on all four sides, creating the effect of rays of light to emanate from the center stone. He then fashioned a scalloped bezel, trimmed it in twisted silver, soldered it to the center of the concha. On this, instead of the usual tight band loop that appeared on the others, he soldered and open loop and peg on the reverse. After oxidizing all thirteen pieces of silver and buffing each to to a soft Florentine finish, he set the stone in the buckle.
But the conchas needed a belt.
Wings took a sheet a heavy brown-black leather and cut one to the appropriate length and width (about 11/16 of an inch wide), leaving an angled tip at each end. He then beveled the edges giving it depth and providing a more comfortable, elegant fit. He then chose two stamps. The first was the same round heart he had used on the twelve conchas; he chased this pattern at intervals along the entire strip of leather, roughly forty-five in all. Next, he took a stamp in the shape of a shafted arrow and stamped it across the face of each heart, Cupid-style, throughout the length of the belt.
Next, he strung each of the twelve conchas at the proper intervals along the strip of leather. He then fed the belt through the open loop on the back of the buckle, doubled it over, punched a single hole through both layers, and threaded it with a long slender strip of matching brown-black braided leather. This he knotted in the traditional way, pulled the tabs taut, and added spiraled sterling silver tips. The last step was one that he took after he gave the belt to me: punching the holes toward the opposite end so that it would be sized correctly for me, with four holes spaced evenly to allow me to adjust it for wear with jeans or over dresses.
Wearing it was like wearing love itself — even in the post-9/11 years when I wore it on a business trip and the TSA officer singled me out, forcing me to remove the entire thing from the belt loops of my jeans for scanning on the conveyor belt.
Of course, I promptly put it back on, right in the security bay. I was, after all, a long way from home . . . and my belt was a reminder of the love in all directions that surrounded me even when we were apart.
Symbols of the Four Sacred Directions also often double as symbols of the Four Winds. On that day, they were winds of love blowing me home.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
