It’s raining.
It’s a relief; morning brought us heavy clouds playing hide-and-seek with the sun, with plenty of glare to go around and plenty of heat and humidity with it. Now, the air has cooled drastically, and it feels as though our whole small world, like us, can breathe again.
We’ve had one heavy shower, and the prospect of extreme weather seems likely for tonight, but for the moment, it’s just a slow, steady rain, falling as gently as the gray clouds drift above. It’s a time for the small summer spirits to return: butterflies, dragonflies, spirits of water, and of light.
In truth, we’ve had relatively few of either thus far: a giant tiger swallowtail last week, a giant crystal blue dragonfly the week before. Oh, a few of the tiny whites annd sulphs and damselflies have been fluttering through the catmint and clover, but even their numbers are greatly reduced this year. I suspect that it’s a mix of the oppressive heat and equally suffocating smoke that has marked so much of this season thus far here, coupled with, if perhaps more recent rain than we might have expected, still nowhere near enough precipitation to bring the pond back into being.
And so the rain becomes more welcome than ever, but so, too, does the return of such seasonal spirits.
This week’s #TBT featured work is manifest in the form and shape of one these tiny summer beings: a messenger, one able to traverse winds and waters alike, capable of movement in all directions. It’s Dragonfly as you’ve never seen him before, perfectly segmented body and veined wings and outsized eyes, all in roughly real-life size and shape and shimmering silver in the light.
This was, perhaps the very first in Wings’s informal but longstanding series of dragonfly pendants; if not, it was very near to it. The first one, as I recall, was in fact created with a segmented triangle-wire body and ingot ball-bead eyes, which makes this a likely candidate. There were other all-silver ones, of course, and several with eyes formed of gemstone cabochons in a variety of materials; the wing shapes and vein patterns varies, as did the wire and the saw-work of each body. But this one has always struck me as the template, in a manner of speaking — the archetype for all the rest.
Each such pendant hung between two and three inches in overall length, with the wingspan probably averaging some two and a half inches. The foundation of each work was the body, formed of sterling silver “wire” of a decent heavy gauge, cut to length, then saw-cut and/or shaped individually. In this instance, Wings chose triangle wire, solid and substantial, molded so that each of its three angles were of the same size, giving it a sharp apex along the top. Wings cut the lower end on a subtle taper, filing it smooth, then creating the individual segments in the body. Those segments are formed by five parallel lines scored deeply into the silver, each an equal distance from the next, each wrapping all the way around the wire. At the top of the wire, rather than tapering it, Wings left it cut bluntly, then filed it smooth to hold the bail. The bail was also formed of sterling silver, cut into heavy strip, the formed into a perfect loop and soldered securely into place.
This is a work that utilized nearly every traditional silversmithing technique: saw-cutting, scorework, stampwork, ingot, overlay, underlay. That last is one that isn’t much discussed anymore; most sellers misdescribe such work as “overlay,” but in fact, “underlay” is a very real thing. In this instance, it’s the wings: four total, two pairs of pairs, independently articulated yet created as a single organic piece. He saw-cut all the edges freehand, from the straight, sweeping topline to the tapered upper ends to the rounded lower ends to the wave-like pattern of the underwings’ edges to the impossibly narrow spaces separating upper and lower wings on each side. He stamped their surfaces freehand, too: a chisel-end stamp carved in a line of tiny points, the line applied on the vertical and repeated over and over across all four wings, dozens of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer created a veined appearance so shimmery that it reminds me of the crystal blue dragonfly that buzzed past my cheek a couple of weeks ago. Once the stampwork was complete, he arranged them directly under the upper half of the triangle-wire body, centering them perfectly, then soldering them securely to the reverse.
One more substantive task remained, and this was the one that involved overlay techniques . . . and also ingot work. He melted, poured, and cooled a little sterling silver ingot, forming a pair of ball beads, perfect silver spheres left undrilled. These he positioned at the top of the body, one on either side of the triangle wire, filling the visible gap between body and bail, and also between wings and bail. Once position, he soldered them seamlessly to the sides of the upper body, one on each upper angle of the triangle wire. Then, all the remained was to oxidize all the scorework and stampwork heavily, ensuring that it would pop when the whole was buffed to a medium-high polish: body, wings, eyes, bail. Then he threaded a sterling silver open-link chain through the bail, and it was ready to put into inventory.
This one sold in 2009, if memory serves, and I no longer have any idea who the purchaser would have been. It may or may not have been the actual prototype for the series, but it was certainly archetype for it — and for the small spirits of summer on whom our world’s well-being depends. They are just beginning to return now, these spirits of water, and of light, and we will all be better for their presence.
~ Aji
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