The Day of All Souls, and our small world is as eerie as one might expect for such a marker. After a second small dusting of snow shortly after midnight, the cold and dark settled in for the duration, an appropriately icy end to a mostly uneventful night. Dawn seemed more suggestion than fact, such light as there was dimmed by the heavy fog shrouding the land on all sides.
That will change, of course; even now, the sun is beginning to gain on the clouds, its rays limning the upper edges of their gray-white mass. The day will meet its predictions easily: a cold hard sun, clear and bright. Winter is here, at least for the moment, but the sun will warm air and winds alike sufficiently, at least, to melt what little remains of yesterday morning’s half-foot of heavy wet snow. Even so, all traces of summer are now gone; we are, at long last, unquestionably headed into the cold season.
The motifs of heavy weather, of gathering and clearing alike and the blue behind the storm, reminded me of one of Wings more recent works, at least in terms of this series. It’s a throwback of only some eight months, a pair of earrings commissioned by a dear friend.
In this instance, the work began with the stones. That’s true more often than not with earrings anyway, but with these, it was especially the case. Our friend had, a few months before, purchased a barrette made with a spectacularly beautiful — and mysterious-looking — Bisbee turquoise cabochon, one of a small collection of matching cabs, a half-dozen or so, that Wings had acquired some six or seven years previously. They were unusual in multiple respects: While one was nearly uniformly oval (a stone that found its way into a cuff now in my personal collection), it seemed more by accident and design; all were free-form cabochons rather than the perfectly calibrated geometry of stones most often used in such works. The lapidary work was also unusual; they were smooth and polished, but had not been given the high gloss that is customary with most turquoise cabs today. Finally, the patterning of the stones was different, too —deep teal blues, approaching indigo, aswirl with mysterious whorls of siltstone of such a dark red as to be nearly black, with bold patches and delicate traces of silvery iron pyrite scattered throughout. They looked like products of the old lapidary methods, the sorts of stones, albeit far smaller, that one might have found in Native silverwork from a century ago.
At any rate, the stones sat in Wings’s collection for a time before he used the first cabochon, the one that in 2013 found its way into my cuff. Thereafter, the remainder of the stones stayed in their case for another four years, until Wings rediscovered them last year and chose the largest of them to create a truly spectacular barrette of unusual design and animating spirit. Our friend, who has long thick hair reminiscent of my own, immediately fell in love with the barrette and bought it. In the discussions of the stone that ensued over a period of months, I told her that it was the largest of a small collection of five or six such cabochons clearly culled from the same deposit. She was interested to know what the remaining cabochons looked like, and early this year, she commissioned a pair of earrings with the two remaining cabs of similar size and shape.
When it comes to jewelry, our friend and I share another similarity: a fondness for long, mobile, dangling earrings, the kind that dance and catch the light. And so we all knew, immediately, that these would be a “dangly” pair; the only question was the specific form they would take. And so Wings took the cabs and set to work.
As I noted above, these were all freeform cabochons, meaning that they were cut to follow the lines of the stone itself, rather than some arbitrary and predefined geometric shape. At first glance, both appear oval, and they are, but not perfectly, uniformly so. And so Wings set about creating bezels for them that would fit their unique shapes even as he worked to bring them into some sort of basic visual alignment. He began with the backings for the bezels, cut to shape out of sheet silver, with the edges tracing the outlined shapes a few millimeters beyond the stones’ edges, the better to accommodate both bezel and the twisted silver with which he would ultimately ring them. When he cut out the backings, however, he did so with two small additions: a small rounded tab extending from the top, and a somewhat larger flared tab extending from the bottom. These he would pierce by hand to create the built-in equivalent of jump rings to hold the wires at the top and the dangling “fringes” at the bottom of each stone.
Next, he created a pair of saw-toothed bezels with fine serrated edges, the better to hold each stone securely. These he soldered firmly into place atop the backings. He then edged each bezel with a fine strand of twisted silver. It seems, perhaps, a superfluous detail, but it’s not; the spiraled trim both gives the edges a finished look and sets off the stone it encloses.
The bezels complete, he turned his attention to the “fringe.” It’s a delicate balance, creating tasseled “fringe” out of sterling silver. It must be solid enough to hold its shape, but not so large as to weigh down the earrings or to overwhelm the cabochons above them. Wings has created such “tassels” from sterling silver wire in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from the thinnest of strands that looks like genuine wire to bolder lengths of the geometric solid silver known as triangle, half-round, or round wire. In this instance, he chose a slender strand of half-round wire of a relatively fine gauge, only a few millimeters across. He cut four equal lengths, filing one end of each flat and smooth and drilling a fine hole across its width, the other to a point that would help it dangle properly. He then chose a stamp in the shape of one of the summer spirits, Butterfly — the better to match the form and shape of our friend’s existing barrette — and stamped it, freehand, down the half-round surface of each of the four “tassels.”
Next, he selected four sterling silver jump rings and used them to attach the fringe” to the cabochons by feeding one ring through the hole drilled in the top of each tassel, then attaching it to the matching hole in the flanged tab extending from the bottom of the bezels. He then fed the wires through the hole drilled in the top tab. Finally, he oxidized the joins in the bezels and the stampwork on the “tassels,” then buffed them by hand. Lastly, he set the stones, and the earrings were complete.
At the time of their completion, spring was just around the corner. It felt, perhaps, like an invocation, the clearing of winter stormclouds to make way for bluer skies and warmer winds. But the essential storminess of the cabochons is an elemental part of their beauty, one that seems to fit as well today. Even as our own skies begin to clear, the fog still hangs low and heavy over the land beneath a bright blue vault overhead, and we know that as we today remember the spirits of those who have walked on, more heavy weather is just around the corner.
Winter is here for the moment, and even though the sun will banish it momentarily, it will soon return to stay. Still, the prospect holds no fear, because we know that there will always be the blue behind the storm.
~ Aji
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