Summer is just around the corner, but you wouldn’t know it from our weather. It’s cold and blustery again today, bright sun interspersed with roiling black banks of clouds there, high winds and scattered showers moving through intermittently. As midday passes into the full of the afternoon, the world outside the window seems mostly gray.
Except for the earth itself. Cold notwithstanding, the land is alive with the jade glow of summer, fields tall and lush with hay, even the meadows on the upper slopes of the mountains now solidly, vibrantly green.
In the face of incalculable human-driven harm, our world remains far more resilient than we realize, or deserve.
Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest, embodies this very resilience, these lush and abundant blessings of summer, the gifts of a world still generous to us despite our lack of stewardship. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Summer’s Meadow Cuff Bracelet
Keep the luminous green magic of a summer’s meadow close to hand with this new cuff by Wings. Wrought of solid, heavy-gauge sterling silver triangle wire, the band ends in softly rounded corners for comfort. Long, graceful stems that flow like water trail along each side of the cuff’s upper band, interspersed with hand-stamped blossom motifs. Along the band’s apex, scores, perhaps hundreds, of tiny chisel marks adorn the very center in a repeating pattern, adding depth and substance to its appearance. One either side of the center sit a pair of hand-made sterling silver ingot conchas, each stamped, repoussé-fashion, into a three-dimensional blossom design. Between the two ingot conchas sit a matched pair of square, high-domed, bezel-set conchas in luminous lime jade, the color of summer meadow grass, turned at ninety-degree angles to form lush green Eyes of Spirit. The cuff is 6″ long and 3/8″ across at the base of the heavy “triangle”; the ingot blossoms are 1/4″ across; the lime jade cabochons are also 1/4″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above and below.
Sterling silver; lime jade
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The grass is long, in need of mowing; the trees have all leafed out now. The land shimmers, a crisp bright green at dawn, an impossibly warm and glowing emerald at dusk. Even in the face of the storm, its color remains true and bright, one bit of stability in the caprice that characterizes these waning weeks of spring.
And up on the peaks, the meadows are reborn, flourishing — granting us the beauty and promise inherent in the jade glow of summer.
~ 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.
