The last day of official spring, last full day of lengthening light, and what was brilliant sun now hides itself intermittently behind a veil of clouds. There is a chill in the air that speaks more of early May than the last half of June — no rain forecast, nor even likely, but unseasonal weather all the same.
Still, this is summer, the time of warming winds, days of earth and light.
Today’s featured throwback work goes back not far at all in time, but to the season’s near-exact opposite: the end of last November, autumn fast ceding territory to winter. It was, even then, a piece of spectacular warmth, one that evoked the red sands of this place and its ethereal golden light, too.
This piece was a very special commission, one created for a dear friend who, for all practical purposes, a little sister to us both. She and Wings share a birthday; she and I share remarkably similar tastes in jewelry, and — not insignificantly for this week’s #TBT entry — the problems inherent in dealing, on a day to day basis, with very long heavy hair. And so whenever she wants either to order or to commission a new barrette, she knows that she can rely on my word as to whether a given piece or style will work for her; if it will work for my own hair, it will work for hers.
In this instance, she wanted a barrette that would coordinate with another piece she had commissioned some years ago, and one that has previously been featured in this space: a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a turtle, built around a fabulous focal stone of picture jasper. Wings still had a number of picture jasper cabochons in his inventory of stones, and so I sent her photos of them all so that she could choose which she liked the best.
Of those, the one she ultimately selected was the one shown here (and rightly so, to my mind): perfectly round, with a remarkably lifelike “desert landscape” scene occurring naturally in the stone. It’s why they call it “picture jasper”; it manifests in shades of browns and grays, very often roughly bisected between the two colors and further dotted and banded with other patterns. It’s all part of the matrix of the stone, natural inclusions of varying colors and materials that form over time on a geologic scale, but very often it presents as what could be mistaken for a desert landscape painting in miniature.
This one was unusual in that it resembled, very literally, our own mountain-desert landscapes of summer: dusty brown earth dotted with sage and chamisa; rugged red mountains ringing the horizon; stormy skies turned gray with rain; even a raptor soaring on the currents in the upper left quadrant of the stone.
It was also the largest of the collection, which meant special creative accommodations.
A stone of that size cannot be used in just any design. It requires a setting large enough to balance it — not merely the bezel, but the entire background of the overall work. It also requires a somewhat heavier gauge of silver to support it than would a smaller stone, which creates a tricky proposition for something like a barrette. The wearer wants it to be solid enough to hold its shape and remain upright, but not so heavy that it pulls her hair down or falls out entirely.
With a barrette, there’s another issue, too: It needs to curve sufficiently to hold the hair in place. Our friend was not particularly concerned with whether the barrette was of single piece, holding the hair via a French clip on the back, or two-piece version of curved band and pick; she has a number of barrettes made by Wings in both styles. She just wanted it to function properly while featuring that spectacular stone.
And so, Wings set to work. For a piece like this, the design process encompasses numerous discrete stages, each of which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the work itself. First, he had to choose the silver.
Most such designs today are created with sheet silver, purchased already formed in long “sheets” of varying thicknesses. The thickness, of course, determines the weight, or gauge, of the silver; the lower the gauge, the thicker and heavier it will be. For most pieces (the average pendant, pin, belt buckle, earrings, etc.) silversmiths will choose lighter gauges — between say, 18- and 22-gauge silver. Cuff bracelets (and sometimes rings) are more likely to be heavier, both from a practical standpoint and aesthetically; they tend to suffer more wear and tear because of the manner in which they are worn, and a lot of classic Southwestern-style Native designs, especially for bracelets, depend upon a thick, heavy silver base for the design.
Barrettes tend to fall in between. They need to be just heavy enough to handle the constant tension imposed on the metal when the wearer puts them on or takes them off, but not so heavy that they will pull one’s hair or simply fall out of it entirely. They also need to be lightweight enough to be flexible in the first place: French clips are hammered into a slight arc and held by the two ends of the clip itself; pick-style barrettes are shaped into a more extreme arc in order to hold the hair between it and the bar formed by the pick.
If memory serves, this piece was made of either eighteen- or twenty-gauge silver; sturdy enough to hold its shape while not weighing down the hair, and still light enough to be susceptible to that shaping. And so, Wings cut the silver to size — and because of the sheer size of the cabochon to be used, it had to be higher than normal, roughly a couple inches in height, as I recall. The extra size made for extra weight, hence the need to a use a relatively light (but not too light) gauge of silver
At this point, he might more usually have stamped it, but he was contemplating the possibility of feeding it by hand through his rolling mill. When he realized the synchronicity between one of his milling designs and the stone, he had his answer: picture jasper in a desert landscape design set against an earthy whorled pattern like fossilized stone. Once the millwork was complete, he filed the edges smooth and rounded off the corners at the ends for comfort, then drilled a small, smooth hole on either side about three-quarters of an inch or so from the ends.
Now, Wings had to create a bezel that would accommodate the stone. He already knew the approach he would take, but it’s worth walking through it, because it’s significant to the overall design.
Working with very large stones can create an issue of wearability. It’s one reason why, with Southwestern Native jewelry, you so very often see large stones only in cuffs suitable for wear, on average, by a man with relatively large wrists: A band, any band, whether for a cuff bracelet or a ring, must be curved in a fairly steep arc. And that arc, by necessity, cannot bend underneath the actual stone itself; the stone needs a [nearly perfectly] flat surface. Without it, the movement at either side of the soldered bezel will eventually cause bezel and band to separate. And even a slight separation can cause the stone to fall out, or the bezel to break off entirely. The same holds true of other items that require a curved, convex surface: belt buckles, barrettes. But there is a solution: an elevated bezel.
You can see it in the photo above; the bezel is lifted ever so slightly above the barrette itself, using a very short, slender tube of sterling silver. One end of the tube is soldered securely to the center of the barrette (or cuff, as the case may be), and the other to the center of the bezel’s backing. This lifts the cabochon, and the bezel that holds it, just enough to permit the work itself to be adjusted, its arc tightened or loosened, without imperiling the security of the stone. Wings crafted the bezel first — in this instance, scalloped, with a plain flat backing that extended slightly beyond it, just enough to hold the twisted silver trim — then separately hammered the barrette lightly around a mandrel to give it the proper curvature. He then soldered the tube into place and the backing to the top of the tube.
Once the bezel was affixed in place, he needed to create the pick. For this, he chose a length of sterling silver half-round wire — solid, sturdy, and stable. He rounded off one end slightly and filed it smooth, then snipped the other end into a point and smoothed its edges, as well. He then chose a single stamp, this one in the stylized shape of a butterfly, and chased it down the entire length of the wire’s surface in a repeating pattern.
This process is not as easy as it looks. First, the stampwork is not occurring on a flat surface; half-round wire is exactly that, a length of “wire,” or solid silver, whose top surface is formed in an arc, like a half-circle (hence the name, “half-round”). In addition to dealing with the unsteadiness inherent in stamping a design onto a surface whose sides fall way beneath stamp and hammer, it’s a very tiny, narrow space, but a long one that can easily shift around. Because of its particular dimensions, it’s not really susceptible to being held in a vise on the anvil. This means that Wings has to hold it completely still beneath the stamp while simultaneously striking the hammer with enough force to transfer the entire stamped image despite the curve of the surface.
And he did it some thirty-six times.
Once the stampwork was complete, he created a small round sawtoothed bezel and soldered it securely to the rounded end. This would hold the accent stone he had chosen for the pick: a spectacularly chatoyant tiger’s eye cabochon, manifest in the same earthy browns as the darker shades in the picture jasper, its center luminous with the golden glow of the sun.
he then oxidized both pieces thoroughly, paying particular attention to the stampwork on the pick and the millwork pattern on the barrette, and buffed both to a medium-high polish. This degree of polish, significantly less than a mirror shine, allowed the texture of the whorled-earth millwork patterns to rise up in sharply beautiful relief. Lastly, he set both stones carefully and blessed the piece, and we sent it on its way.
It was a piece well-suited, I thought, to our friend in particular. In practical terms, it was large enough to hold her hair and bold enough to look proportional against her long dark locks. But the earthy nature of design and center stone suited her, too — an intrinsically feminine feel to both, coupled with the designs of the pick, which evoked light as both noun and adjective, the glow of the sun and the lightness of a butterfly’s flight.
It was also a perfect counterpart to the winter that was then well on its way: a reminder that, snow and ice and bitter cold notwithstanding, summer would return. Officially, that moment comes tomorrow morning, but we are already well into the season, these days of earth and light.
~ 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.
