The clouds are back, and at least over the peaks, now bearing snow.
They were given no more than a dusting in the early hours of last night, while down here, it was more sleet than snow, and precious little of that. By the early morning hours, the skies had cleared, stars cold and bright once more. It seemed then that we might get nothing more. We are glad to be wrong.
Still, the stars are beautiful, resembling in their own way little chips of ice shimmering silver against a sky the very often fails to get completely dark. It’s not a product of a lingering sunset, not in these shortened days, nor is it the glow of a northern aurora; we are too far south for that. No, it’s the result of the impossible clarity of air and sky here at this altitude, the kind that turns a blackened sky the shade of dark red wine and shows us stars so old and far away that our children seven generations on will still see them, and seven generations beyond in seemingly infinite number.
And that, too, is an oddity of our cosmos, and of light and human perception, that celestial bodies so indescribably hot with flames could appear to us as cold and bright as ice: night sun and star fire, elemental spirits that transcend time and light itself.
This week’s #ThrowbackThursday work embodies such powers in an old and beautiful traditional style. It’s also a throwback only to some four months ago, although their genesis lay in a conversation of more than a year ago. It’s a pair of earrings that Wings created as a belated birthday gift for one of our dearest friends, one who shares the same birthday as his own.
Belated, as it happens, because while he intended to have them finished and delivered to her in plenty of time, but international shipping and supply-chain and delivery issues stymied our best-laid plans. But I mentioned that the idea of this pair came from a conversation dating back a couple of years, and that is true: I had posted some of Wings’s then-new works of gemstone bead jewelry, and a few of them included rounds and doughnut rondels of intensely-hued and chatoyant red tiger’s eye. It caught our friend’s attention, and she mentioned wanting, eventually, to commission something made with cabochons of the same material, but wasn’t sure yet what she wanted.
But whether she would eventually decide upon earrings or something else, we both knew that she would always enjoy another pair of earrings, and her tastes run very similarly to my own: bold, long, dangling, with stones in deep jewel tones. Over the years, she has amassed a fantastic collection of Wings’s work, with necklaces, bracelets, barrettes, and earrings in complete sets of lapis, turquoise, onyx, amethyst, moonstone, and other stones and shades. She has lately been adding to it with reds here and there, and another friend had also expressed an interest in a piece made with red tiger’s eye, so it seemed a good time to order a selection of cabochons in that stone.
We didn’t expect shipping to take something like three months.
It turned out to be worth the wait. The parcels we ordered consisted of some six or seven individual cabochons of varying shapes and sizes, plus a separate parcel of four slightly smaller matched rounds. The cab in last week’s #TBT featured work was the slightly larger independently-purchased rounds; the pair in today’s featured pair of earrings were half of the parcel of four very slightly smaller ones.
Our reason for ordering so many different shapes and sizes was three-fold. First, when ordering gemstones online, it’s impossible to get a true rendering of color, shape, and size; you need to see the stones in person, and more to the point, in both natural and artificial light and in a context relative to their eventual setting, for that. Second, what looks perfect on-screen may in fact not hold a candle to something that appears less suitable, and we need to be flexible enough to accommodate that; besides, he will always use whatever’s left in other pieces eventually, anyway. Third, and perhaps most significant here, the cabs needed to be natural red tiger’s eye.
Because not all of it is.
Indeed, the truth is that most of it is likely not. Tiger’s eye is a stone that most people know in its banding of brown and gold shades, but it in fact manifests in shades of red and dark blue-gray, as well (and a few other, rarer hues). It all depends on what other minerals have included into the deposit with it; the reds and rusty shades occur in the presence of iron, which oxidizes as it weathers, infusing everything around it with red. It makes for a beautiful, fiery gem, and the chatoyant banding remains pronounced, as you can see in the image above.
But mass production of cabochons for cheap commercial use requires more (and less, actually). This is true not only of tiger’s eye, but of coral, turquoise, and a whole host of other materials that the lay public generally conceives as being always of a certain color. The truth is that there is no particular uniformity of color to most materials, and in fact, the most common colors (and the most accessible ones) are not likely to be that which people regard as the standard.
Enter synthetic treatments, such as dyed gemstones. In the context of turquoise, I’ve written about some of the processes involved here; related to coral and some of its fellow reds, here. Wings prefers not to use dyed or otherwise artificially treated materials whenever possible, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially if a customer wants a particular color at a particular price point; either way, we always disclose any treatments that we know of or suspect. With red tiger’s eye, many of the commercially produced, calibrated cabochons are dyed a darker, deeper, more uniform red to make the color appear more intense . . . but it also has the effect of flattening their chatoyance and the wide gradient of shades and inclusions that might otherwise be visible. And so we searched for a very long time to find just the right selection from which to choose, and these were among the results.
And as you can, this pair was full of fabulous banding and lines, with a beautiful gradient that looked like a wine-red night sky lit with shimmering antique rose. He hand-selected which two should go in this pair, then set about creating bezels for them, the walls of the bezel plain, low-profile, and elegantly simple, the backings hand-punched and extending slightly beyond the sides to create a shimmering halo effect, like a corona around the sun or the moon.
But these backings held a secret:
Wings goes to some lengths to conserve the silver he uses. Part of it’s just good business; you don’t get nearly the exchange rate for so-called “dirty” silver that you do for “clean,” and even for clean you don’t get full price. So it behooves jewelers and smiths to make use of every bit they can. He had created a work that involved part of the silver being hand-milled, meaning cranked by hand through his rolling mill, using a template that consists of slender lines in parallel, with variable spacing, studded at different places with organic orbs extending slightly beyond their edges. It’s a pattern that resembles Morse code, and I suspect that that is what the designer had in mind for it, although I also suspect that the pattern of dots and dashes, so to speak, doesn’t actually translate to anything. To us, though, it evokes the feel of rain, of falling water, and of the fall of stars, as well. And with the silver left over from the unrelated work, he punched out two perfectly sized medallions to serve as the backings for these glowing red suns.
Then he turned his attention to the pendants. Each of these pendants was originally a perfect circle, edges smooth and regular. While still flat, he added the stampwork, all freehand, using a single stamp: a triangular four-pole tipi pattern. He placed one at each of the four cardinal directions, a few millimeters from the edge all the way around. Then, moving to each of the ordinal points, he stamped to at that same spot, side by side, with a third stacked on top of it. When complete, the negative space at the center formed a traditional Indigenous eight-pointed star. The stampwork was sufficiently deep and heavy to displace the silver, “ruffling” the previously smooth edges slightly. then he turned them over and domed them gently, repoussé-fashion, into traditional conchas. Between the doming, the stampwork pattern, the now slightly irregular edges, and the fact that they were linked to the bezels via jump rings allowed the stars to dance.
It was a spectacularly simple design . . . one not nearly so simple to conceive, never mind execute. But talent and experience tell, and he managed it on the first go, with no revisions. And about seven weeks after our intended delivery date, our friend received them.
She, like Wings, is a child of the middle of summer. It’s winter now, and here, at least, it’s cold and blustery, with clouds low and threatening snow and an icy trickster wind cutting straight to the bone. But no matter the season, we still have skies of night sun and star fire, and she wears their warmth and light now.
~ Aji
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