It’s the old origin story of turquoise, as some of the peoples of this area tell it: the Skystone, pieces of bright blue sky fallen to earth as rain, hardened by the land’s fiery heat into a jewel of value far beyond its worth as a gemstone.
And despite fall’s early arrival, the rains are still here, if intermittently so; more is expected late today, and already the clouds are gathering above the northern and western horizons. This is still the season when the sky becomes the stone.
It reminded me of one of Wings’s simplest, boldest, most traditional small works from many years ago, the ring pictured above and below. Wrought, if memory serves, sometime in 2006, it features a perfect specimen of classic Royston turquoise, the Indian turquoise as the earth of what is now known as Nevada forms and eventually relinquishes it. It’s also a perfect embodiment of the Skystone story: clear sky blue, bright, glossy, and hard, webbed and patched with golden-brown earth tones — and elemental jewel, water driven by wind to an earth whose fire compresses it into a gem, glowing in the light.
It was a near-perfect example, too, of a traditional Native ring from this area, with a vintage shape and sensibility and spirit.
This design began with the stone. For one of this sheer size, it would need a band wide enough to support it, in both practical and aesthetic terms. Wings wanted, however, to keep it relatively slender and low-profile — not a wide band that would surround the stone, but one narrow enough to keep the focus where it belonged, and permit it to be worn by anyone, without regard to gender norms.
I suspect that the execution of the design began with the band, too, although it’s been too many years for either of us to recall definitively. This band was a fairly substantial gauge of silver, thick and solid and cut freehand to the proper length. While still flat, Wings laid it on his anvil for stamping. He chose a single stamp — one that resembles a cross but is in fact a Four Sacred Directions, or perhaps more to the point, a Four Winds motif, four equidistant spokes meeting at a center point, their ends flaring outward to the cardinal points of the compass with a slight twist to each end, implying a whirlwind sense of motion. It’s an image he uses to represent the directions, the winds, the vortex, or the power of the storm. This he stamped deeply at one end of what would become the band, then chased the motif all the way down its length in a repeating pattern. Once complete, he filed the edges smooth, then placed it against a mandrel and hammered it gently with a jeweler’s mallet to bend it into the proper arc.
Then he turned his attention to the setting for the stone. With a stone of this size (if memory serves, the cabochon was well over an inch long, excluding the bezel), he elected to keep it very simple and uncluttered. As you can see from the image at the top, the cabochon was not a perfect oval, but slightly free-form, with ends that didd not mirror each other exactly. It also was not perfectly straight, but rather, had a very slight turn to it that would likely have been invisible to the naked eye, save for someone like Wings who works with such materials every day. Instead of trying to “correct” for its subtle asymmetries, he worked with them, allowing the stone’s essential form and shape to dictate the setting’s lines.
He began by placing the cabochon on sheet silver and sketching a backing around it, following its lines but leaving a few millimeters of silver extending beyond its edges all the way around. He then fashioned a simple saw-toothed bezel, in this case, a low-profile one that would not extend above the stone’s top surface but merely embrace it securely on all sides. Once the bezel was soldered to the backing, he cut a length of twisted silver and fitted it securely around the bezel on all sides. This was the purpose of leaving space around the stone’s perimeter when creating the backing — to leave room for its sole adornment, the twisted silver edging.
Once the bezel and setting were complete, he turned it over and soldered the band securely to the underside. He then oxidized all of the joins between bezel and backing and twisted silver, then did the same to the stampwork on the band, and buffed the entire piece to a medium-low polish, just a shade or two off Florentine, to give it a finish appropriate to its vintage traditional style.
Lastly, he set the stone. With saw-toothed bezels, it sometimes requires bending a few of the teeth gently outward until the stone is placed correctly, then bending them back inward to hold the cabochon securely. In this instance, I suspect that not much adjustment was needed, given the bezel’s low profile and the smoothness of the stone itself.
Once complete, it looked much like a map of our world, a golden brown earth rising out of blue-green waters, a fitting complement to its identity of fused earth and sky.
As I write, the clouds are now moving in closer overhead. The mercury has dropped noticeably. Perhaps this afternoon we will yet have another illustration of the old story, of when the sky becomes the stone.
~ Aji
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