Our small world here does not quite know what to do with itself. The skies are a clear hot turquoise, small clouds light and white, in a week when our usual patterns would predict harsh heavy rains in the afternoons. And even as the leaves have already begun to turn, the grass is newly adorned with a sudden burst of dandelions, which normally have all disappeared upon the winds by mid-June.
In these landlocked portions of Turtle Island, this is how climate change shows itself — indeed, has been showing itself, for a decade and more already. It manifests not, mostly, in catastrophic conditions, but in the day-to-day changes that just as surely upend and invert our whole world.
And so it is that in a week when we more usually would be planning our days around afternoon monsoons, always wary of flash-flooding, we instead have the conditions of early autumn:; flowering earth, radiant sky.
It brought to mind today’s featured throwback work, one that dates to October of last year. It was the fourth in a series of special commissions by a dear friend, who now owns five or six different hair cuffs designed and created specially for her by Wings. This one featured a powerful collection of motifs embracing a truly phenomenal stone.
Because he created the four of which this one was a part more or less simultaneously, it’s impossible to break down which came first in each, silver or stone. He already knew which four stones would be used; our friend chose them specifically from among the various options in his inventory. He also had some vague notions of the forms the stampwork would take, but at this point, which ultimately would match up with which cabochon remained an open question.
I’ve written before, in this very space, about the general design of a hair cuff. It’s an elongated rectangle bent into an arc, forming the decorative “cuff,” which is placed around a lock of hair held in a ponytail or braid; a prong on the inner surface of the cuff, around which a ponytail holder may be looped, keeps the hair held securely behind the cuff. It’s a way to adorn the lower reaches of a ponytail or braid, rather than simply ornamenting the very top or very bottom, respectively.
And because of its structure, execution of the design begins with the cuff itself.
It begins as a flat piece of sterling silver, a rectangle only slightly off a perfect square. It looks long and slender and thoroughly rectangular in the images, yes, but that’s the finished piece; imagine it with the sides straightened out so that it lies flat, and you’ll see why it must be only slightly less wide than it is long.
Wings cut the silver freehand, then rounded the corners for comfort and filed the edges smooth. Then, still leaving it flat, he turned his attention to the stampwork. In this instance, if memory serves, he had not yet decided between two of the selected cabochons for this particular design. Accordingly, he needed to create a pattern that would accommodate either of them, since all of the stones were of very different sizes and shapes. For this one, he settled on a stylized sunburst motif, one that would be complement the details of a directional design.
It began with the sunburst: the series of flared score marks radiating out from the center. Wings does all his work freehand, and as you can see, while the lines are roughly equidistant, the spaces they create are not perfectly identical in width. It’s the mark of stampwork done by hand, and also an image more reflective of actual human perspective on natural light and angles.
Once the scorework was complete, he chose two crescent-shaped stamps of differing size, both designed to produce an effect much like rays of light. The larger, indeed, is one that he normally uses to represent the rising sun, and this one he placed in a repeating pattern around the sunburst, in between each pair of scoremarks. The second, smaller stamp looked much like a tiny crescent moon with rays of light extending outward on all sides, and this he used to join the ends of each sunrise symbol, effectively enclosing the scoremarks into a flowering, petal-like corona of silver light.
Third, he selected a stamp wrought in a stylized arrowhead design. It’s a stamp that is susceptible to multiple uses and symbolic motifs; its design resembles two arrowheads placed at angles to each other so that their points meet, with the outer axis of each adorned by short perpendicular lines that extend, again, like small rays of light. It produces an image that can serve as a meta representation of an arrowhead, i.e., arrowheads within arrowheads in a layered archetypal fashion; as a lodge symbol of sorts, with its tipi-like outer shape; or as a mountain motif, perhaps one with the rays of a rising or setting sign visible behind its slopes. In this instance, the points turned inward, as though indicating the that flowering earth visible at its edges was born of the sun itself.
Finally, he chose a stamp in the shape of a bear’s pawprint, a sign of protection and of medicine. This he placed at the ordinal points of the piece: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. It produced an overall design whose effects spoke of illumination and renewal, protection and healing. Lastly for this stage of the work, he placed the cuff against a mandrel and gently hammered it into the proper arc.
Stampwork and shaping complete, it was time to turn his attention to the inner surface. As noted above, a hair cuff requires a prong on the inside to hold ponytail holder and thus, the hair itself. As such, it needs to provide a bit of tension while not being either too close to the surface or too far away from it.
Wings solved this issue by choosing a length of sterling silver pattern wire slightly longer than the hair cuff itself. He cut one end into a tapered point, then filed it smooth; the other he left square, and gently bent the top portion, perhaps a centimeter or so, over backwards, simultaneously bending the pointed end inwards slightly. Then he soldered the bent portion securely into place at the top of the haircuff’s inner band, squarely in the center. The angle at which he shaped it before soldering provided the necessary tension, while still leaving sufficient room.
At last, it was time to address the stone.
The stone itself was fairly small, probably in the neighborhood of an inch in length, perhaps between a quarter- and a half-inch across at its widest point. It doesn’t sound like much, been when it needs to be set into a bezel and placed atop a larger setting that is shaped into a dramatic curve? It requires special handling.
First, Wings began by creating the setting itself. He cut, freehand, a piece of solid sterling silver that followed the lines of the freeform cabochon while extending a few millimeters beyond its edges. This would form the backing of the bezel, and it would leave sufficient room for the twisted-silver trim. Once filed smooth, he then fashioned a scalloped bezel and soldered its securely into the center of the backing, then soldered the twisted silver into place around between bezel and edge. For a cabochon like this one, freeform in shape and fairly highly domed, the scalloped nature of the bezel would hold it solidly in place even as it kept a sufficiently low profile to let the stone’s beauty speak for itself, and the twisted silver set off its strikingly webbed indigo blue.
This completed the bezel itself, but it was still not time to attach it to the cuff. Because of the cuff’s steep arc, no bezel could be soldered directly onto the center of its surface; the solder would eventually begin to disintegrate, and the bezel would risk breaking off entirely. The solution is to raise the bezel slightly off the surface of the piece, and he accomplished this via a tiny length of sterling silver tubing, itself only millimeters high, soldered atop the very center of the cuff. He then turned it over and soldered the upper, exposed end of the tube to the underside of the bezel.
Once complete, all that remained was to buff the piece and set the stone. He choose a soft Florentine finish for the inner surface, and a medium-high polish for the outside. He then carefully set the stone, an extraordinary cabochon of ultra-high-grade Kingman turquoise, one of a small parcel of such specimens he purchased many years ago. It was truly a phenomenal gem: turquoise of such a deep, intense, electric blue as to appear nearly pure indigo, water-webbed with an impossibly tight spiderweb matrix in inky shades of black.
He then blessed it and we shipped it off to our friend: a perfect combination of flowering earth, radiant sky.
~ 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.
