We awakened this morning to feathered skies — mares’ tails and wispy traces of cloud that herald the coming change in the weather. After yesterday’s unseasonal high of forty-six, snow is forecast for tomorrow night and Friday, with a drop in the mercury sure to follow.
We have been enjoying the warmth, but it’s an uneasy peace: We know that such temperatures signal environmental disruption, an earth out of balance and harmony. And despite the inconveniences that come with snow and bitter cold, we are glad to see them return.
Unlike yesterday’s clear blue, today the vault over head is a webbed indigo, a turquoise zigged and zagged with white and silver, gray and violet, all the shades of a filtered sun and the colors of the storm to come. Much of the clouds do indeed look like feathers, barbs frayed with flight at the very edge, like the wings of some great winter spirit bird here to carry not our prayers, but those of Mother Earth.
It’s an image that finds expression in today’s featured work, one forged in the same silver light outside the window and set with the same webbed sherds of sky. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Feathered Skies Cuff Bracelet
Feathered skies are a bit of heavenly magic: a turquoise expanse aflutter with mares-tail clouds like the down of the feathers that send our own prayers skyward. Wings catches the blue and the clouds and the feathers, too, and braids them together in this cuff bracelet in electric blues and greens and shimmering silver. The band is hand-milled in a random, repeating feather pattern, down plumes racing across the arc of the light. Across the top stretch five square Skystone cabochons, bezel-set and arranged in a graduated pattern: one large brilliant blue-green square at the center, high-set and aswirl in shades of golden and coppery matrix; on either side, a somewhat smaller pair of squares of rich teal with a mysterious black chert matrix, and all three flanked at either end with small squares of what are likely Bisbee green turquoise, a rich seafoam shade with hints of blue speckled with a tiny coppery siltstone matrix. The inner band features gracefully scalloped stampwork in a repeating flowing-water design along either edge. Band is 6″ long by 1″ across; large focal cabochon is 5/8″ across; medium cabs are 1/2″ across; and small end cabs 3/8″ across (dimensions approximate). Side view shown below.
Sterling silver; indigo and teal-green turquoise (probably Turquoise Mountain, Cloud Mountain, and Bisbee, respectively)
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a work for the year round, blues of summer and winter, storm and sunlit skies, all atop a bold band, a raptor’s wing made pure light. But for this day, it’s a gift: the answer to Mother’s Earth’s prayer, the icy feathers of winter’s return to nurture her body and spirit.
We have another day or two of warmth before the storm. But it is the storm that gives this new year life.
~ Aji
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