For once, the forecast was accurate: We awakened at dawn to snow, heavy giant flakes swirling in the air and collecting on all surfaces. It seems like only a dusting, but nearly an inch covers the rich red-brown earth for this moment, at least.
Now, the sun has emerged, driving the clouds eastward. The trees glitter in the new light, nascent buds like diamonds, and the snow is already melting fast.
It is a gift of both beauty and medicine, a shimmering arc of weather and light.
And it puts me solidly in mind of today’s featured throwback work now, itself a shimmering arc of beaded silver set with tiny fiery suns.
Our throwback work this Thursday holds special resonance now. This one is personal: It’s one of the seven bangles that constituted the set that Wings created for me as a birthday gift two years ago. The number seven has its own significance here, and accordingly, he crafted seven silver hoops, each set with its own collection of seven jeweled stones. The gems in question are turquoise, aquamarine, coral, carnelian, amber, opal, and iolite; this is the carnelian bangle.
All seven bangles were created using solid sterling silver wire in a variety of shapes and patterns. This one falls into the “pattern wire” and, nominally, at least, into the “half-round wire” categories; it’s a little of both. [I’ve covered what this sort of “wire” is here before, and in substantial depth, so I won’t repeat it here. You can read one such explanation in this post, and see one of the other bangles in the collection at the same time.]
This particular strand is indeed half-round wire insofar as it’s formed from a mold that is more or less a half-circle in shape. No, it’s not a perfect half-circle; it rarely is, except perhaps with some of the heavier gauges. It’s a metaphorical descriptor used to denote the fact that the underside of the wire is flat and the upper surface is convex, like the curvature of a half-circle.
But this one is a little different.
“Wire,” in this sense, comes in a variety of geometric shapes, plus spiraled twists and braids, plus two other categories known as “pattern wire” and “bead wire.” This looks like the last, but actually falls into the third category. Bead wire looks, very literally, like beads, at least on the upper surface: small round orbs connected in a strand. Which is what this looks like along the edges . . . but that’s just it; it’s only along the edges. Bead wire is the the entire strand in bead shape. This is pattern wire, which is formed, in this particular instance by pouring ingot into a mold carved into a half–round shape with tiny bead-like spaces edging either side.
It’s also one of my personal favorites. You can see another example of it up close in one of the rings in our current inventory, here: It’s a very simple, subtle, spare design, very understated, which makes it both elegant and yet possessed of an unmistakable shimmer in the light. And it’s perfect for this particular piece, set as it is with the warming red of earth and sun and fire.
The creative process for these is simple, which is not precisely the same thing as being “easy.” Wings already had all the stones set aside for all seven bangles, and chose which should go with which wire as he worked. He began by cutting the wire to length, and that, too, takes a bit of work. For example, both of my wrists are no more than six inches around, which is unusually small for an adult. With a cuff, you’d simply cut the silver and half-inch to an inch shorter than the circumference of the wearer’s wrist. But these are bangles: They are intended to hang loosely, and to get them onto the wrist, they need to go over the widest part of the hand, the area between the base of the thumb and the side of the hand. Also, when working with wire? it’s the circumference of the inner band that counts, but when you cut it, you’re cutting it by measuring the outer surface, so you need to allow some fractions of an inch of extra space before making the cut.
Once the piece was cut to length, he shaped it by by hammering it very gently around a mandrel, then soldered the ends together to form a hoop. The structure of the bangle was now complete, but the gemwork remained. Having already selected the seven tiny round carnelian cabochons to go on this particular bangle, Wings now had to fashion seven equally tiny round bezels, evenly spaced, all around its surface.
This is not the sort of work you can do on a flat surface, as, for example, one would do while soldering a bezel onto a pendant or belt buckle or pair of earrings. The bangle’s band needs to be upright, so that the bezels can be created along the narrow, convex half-round surface and be perfectly spaced and centered in the process. And this is where his small jeweler’s vise comes into play.
Wings actually has a number of vises, including a spectacularly large and heavy one that is permanently installed on a giant low-cut post outside the studio. It’s useful for large items, or for working with extra-heavy gauges of silver. But it would crush a slender strand like this. Enter the tabletop vise, but an especially diminutive one: It’s a tiny contraption of wood and metal, smaller than the palm of one’s hand, that holds a piece firmly in an opening in the wood via metal clips. It permits him to keep a cuff or a bangle upright and motionless while he creates a bezel and solders it into place, then (in this instance) allows him to rotate the band to add the next bezel in the proper position. He continued to solder, cool, and rotate until all bezels were attached. The he quickly cured it, oxidized the joins of the bezels with the band and the granular edges of the pattern wire, and buffed it a finish fractionally brighter than Florentine, a level of polish that he knows I love for its warm, rich, velvety glow.
Then it was time to set the stones. This particular parcel of carnelian was exceptional, particularly for commercially produced calibrated cabs of such a small size. Such parcels are usually lower-grade stone (whatever the stone involved; it’s not specific to carnelian). This is because the high-quality material gets left in large form, the better to command higher prices both wholesale and for the artist in the finished piece. But what gemologists classify as “high-quality” does not always correspond to a stone’s aesthetic beauty. Some turquoise, for example, that is regarded as “low-quality” nonetheless manifests in spectacularly intense shades of blue and green with strikingly complex spiderwebbing, while some pale specimens entirely devoid of personality sell for outrageous prices. It’s why I always tell people to worry less about a stone’s “market value” than whether they like it. If you’re going to invest good money in art jewelry, then make sure that it’s something you actually want to wear, not something you feel like you should choose over another piece just because the colonial world has decreed that it’s “more valuable.” It’s not “more valuable” to you if you don’t like it, don’t want to wear it, or are going to regret not getting the colors and patterns you did like better.
But back to the carnelian: Carnelian is an unusual stone, in terms both of classification and of manifestation. I commonly see it now on amateur colonial seller sites described as “jasper,” but that’s incorrect; carnelian and the various types of jasper are both subtypes of the umbrella category known as chalcedony. You can read more about carnelian here. For the moment, the relevant aspect of this blood-red stone is the fact that it manages somehow to seem both opaque and translucent simultaneously. If forced to classify it, of course, one would call it opaque. But really beautiful specimens of carnelian often have qualities of translucence throughout the stone, whether banded and whorled or manifest almost as an overlay. The glossier the polish on the cabochon, the more likely such qualities are to show — ad for tiny three-millimeter cabs, these were stunningly glossy. It gave the stones an unusual depth, as though one could look into them and see both dancing flames and the swirling lifeblood of the earth itself. Backed by the silver bezels, the reds deepened and brightened simultaneously, giving them the look of tiny drops of fire, like the tears of Father Sun.
And that is, perhaps, the most apt metaphor: tears of a sun crying not out of sadness, but perhaps joy at the chance to play in the light — tears perhaps also made stronger by the force of the wind that is even now whipping at the branches and causing the shadows to shiver and dance. This bangle holds special meaning for me on several different levels, both individually and as one in its collection of seven, but it feels of a piece with this day and this powerfully unsettled season, too: a work of lifeblood and fire on a shimmering arc of weather and light.
~ Aji
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