We finally got our storm yesterday evening, after a whole day of repeated buildup and bypass. It didn’t last especially long, probably under half an hour, but around here, that’s a lengthy rainfall. More common here are sudden sharp cloudbursts throughout the afternoon, each lasting no more than few minutes, but that’s another pattern seemingly lost to us now.
Formerly, monsoonal weather occurred throughout the middle of the afternoon, with skies clearing in time for dusk. Now, the Thunderbirds have turned their attention to twilight, arcing their arrows through sunset storms: rain fire and fire rain.
It’s the light that does it. Sunset here is often a wild and fiery affair anyway, especially in summer; the clouds and dust and smoke from errant wildfires turn the skies a dozen shades of scarlet. When the sun filters out from behind the thunderheads, raindrop beads become a cascade of flames, catching the reddening light and refracting it into gold and amber and copper, coral and rose and crimson.
Yesterday, though, the rains came from the east, driving hard and fast, so hard, in fact, the water bounced off surfaces in a sharply angled spray. The light held steady in the west, and it was out the west windows that the fire lit the water, cascading down in sheets, dangling in heavy drops from every leaf and branch, petal and stalk.
It reminded me of the power of the Thunder Beings, and of the their flaming arrows, bolts of lightning that bring the rains.
It reminded me, too, of today’s featured work, one that was a special commission. It was, in fact, based upon an earlier iteration of the design. Wings never creates any two works that are exactly alike; even when someone wants a piece “just like” some other one, there is always some small change, whether it’s in the stampwork or the cutwork or the choice of stone.
This design found three separate incarnations, all more or less the same in terms of the general form and shape, but each with a different stone. The first was made with a light blue turquoise cabochon, what’s known as “robin’s-egg blue” (and matches the colors of those eggs nearly perfectly). It was old blue Royston, with its hallmark golden-to-golden-brown matrix traced delicately across its surface, a type that frequently used to be found at a Rouston-District mine called “Northern Lights.” In recent years, that area has produced a greener turquoise, but there was a time when the light-blue-and gold-matrix variant was common there. The cabochon also had a slightly-beveled surface edge, giving what was not a terribly thick cabochon a sense of dimension and depth.
It proved to be a popular design. After it sold, we had two additional inquiries. Informed that it was no longer available, but that Wings could create a unique version, the first client preferred a greener turquoise, which he wound up cabbing from a piece a deep teal green Royston aswirl with golden, bronze, and inky black matrix; the second, a particular form of coral, the better to match one of Wings’s cuffs that she already owned. The second one appears above.
The design itself was vanishingly simple: a triangular cabochon turned point-side down, bezel-set into larger triangular setting, and hung via jump rings from a wide tubular bail that held a braided leather thong. It created an image of layered arrowheads — three, in the form of stone, bezel, and backing. It wasn’t intentional, merely synchronicity, but you’ll find that many old representations of Thunderbird show him with exactly three arrows (lightning) in his talons.
In this instance, it began with the stone, because it needed to be cut and cabbed to size and shape. Wings elected to keep the lapidary work simple — cut from a thick piece of apple coral, choosing a corner of it that featured plenty of crimson but also marbled with plenty of gold and bronze, then smoothing the sides, beveling the edges, and polishing only the beveled top surface.
Once the cab was ready, he used it to set the parameters of the backing, which needed to be cut exactly to shape, and larger proportionally on both angled sides. The base of the triangle, of course, would also extend proportionally beyond the points of the cab, but it would be nearly flush with the bezel’s own base, as shown above. After cutting out the setting, he filed the edges smooth.
Next, he needed to create the bezel. In the original version of this pendant, the bezel was plain flat silver, high-sided to hold the stone. Because this stone (like its earlier green turquoise counterpart in the second iteration) was cut from a much thicker sample, it did not need such a deep bezel to hold it securely. Instead, Wings fashioned a saw-toothed bezel — still fairly substantial, but reaching up, at its points, only to about the midpoint of the cab’s thickness. This allowed the beveling of the stone to show clearly, and gave it a feeling of substance. Once the bezel was placed in the proper position and soldered into place, he oxidized the joins and buffed it to high polish.
Next, Wings turned his attention to the top of the pendant. As with the various sizes and shapes of “wire” (e.g., round, half-round, triangle, square, bead, pattern, etc.), it’s also possible to procure sterling silver fashioned into tubes. He took a short length of tube wire and cut it, sharply and cleanly, at an angle on either end, leaving a flared tube of perhaps three-quarters of an inch at the upper (longer) side. He filed the edges silky smooth; the thong would ultimately be fed through it, and it needed to be smooth enough to allow the thong to move without snagging the leather. This became the bail, and he polished it to a mirror finish to match the pendant.
Now, he still needed to attach the bail to the pendant. This he accomplished by soldering one jump ring to the top of the pendant, and another to very center of the base of the bail. The jump rings were turned perpendicular to each other; this allowed them to remain compact and unobtrusive and permit the pendant to swing freely. Once complete, all that remained was to set the stone and create the choker.
The choker itself was simple, strands of black leather braided tightly together to form a rope-like shape, cut to choker length, roughly 17″, and capped with matching sterling silver necklace findings at either end. This was fed through the bail to turn the pendant into a necklace.
The stone, as is perhaps clear from the descriptions above, was phenomenal. It also was not, to be precise, a “stone” at all, but rather, apple coral. I’ve written about it before — a short overview here and in greater detail here. It’s an answer to the tension now between tradition and the colonial harm to the environment that has laid waste to the world’s coral. As I said then:
Many of our Native artisans, beadworkers, and stone-cutters have taken steps to ensure that no bit of coral goes to waste: All the chips and dust left over from cutting and cabbing is carefully collected, then heat-treated to meld all the tiniest bits together into larger pieces that can then be formed into cabochons and beads. . . . It’s real coral, treated to conserve and use as much as possible, and the heat that melds it all creates mysteriously beautiful swirls in a dizzying range of hues.
And this was a spectacularly beautiful specimen: bright crimson, with just a hint of amber underlying it, marbled by bold whorls of bronze edged in golden shades. It created the effect of an arrow tipped with flame — the liquid fire of a sunset rain.
And if the forecast holds, we may get such simultaneous rain and fire again tonight.
~ 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.
