The sun has just emerged again from behind a slate-blue cloud after hiding itself for the better part of the morning and sending the air temperature plummeting. The snow is allegedly two days off yet, but as last night’s near-full moon showed us, rising in midnight-hued sky through bands of ethereal clouds, haloed in a corona of ice and light, the weather is already changing.
The cold is unquestionably here, a season of stardust and snow in the blue shades of winter.
This week’s themes are focused around those blues, and around certain categories of work, too: bracelets of various types already; neckwear in the days to come. And so the pale ice blue of moon and stars, sewn onto a blanket of darkest velvet, put me in mind of a commissioned bracelet, a coil, from just barely more than a year ago — November eighteenth, to be exact. This one was ordered specially by a dear friend who had fallen in love with the jewels used in one of the works in Wings’s drop of a new collection of coil bracelets just prior to that date, but who wanted a similar version in shades of her own favorite color, blue. [As an aside, that coil, which was my own personal favorite, would prove to be very popular; it sold to another dear friend within, if memory serves, a day or so of posting. Entitled Gravity, that piece was formed of pale stardust blues and chatoyant grays that refracted cobalt shades, studded with the hot and cold blacks of lava rock and hematite.]
At the center of the existing coil was a segment of four fabulous barrel beads of extraordinary kyanite: of rare and superb quality, the most amazing specimens of kyanite that either of us has ever seen (and the strand, when we acquired it, was priced accordingly, hence the small number of beads used in each of the coils). Our friend wanted a coil built around those same beads, one that would evoke much the same feel as the first, but in shades of blue instead of black and gray.
And so, we set about making it happen (“we” because, with the gemstone bead jewelry, Wings asks me to help in the design phase as a result of my ability, whether gift or curse, to distinguish “true” colors and the subtle gradations between them). We settled on a series of three different types of gemstone: kyanite in three different forms and shapes; two kinds of blue agate; and one set of beads in cobalt-blue lapis lazuli.
First, a bit about the coils’ construction: They are made in what seems a simple fashion, gemstone beads strung along a length of memory wire. It’s a style that’s been around for quite a long time now, although mostly manifest in inexpensive turquoise chips and nuggets, sometimes accented with a chip or two of coral or spiny oyster shell. In Wings’s hands, coils are not a simple process.
We plot out the design of each coil before stringing begins, down to the level of counting beads to ensure balance on both ends. And the design is not always made to the same formula. With some, a center segment of beads serves as the focal point, but it may be all the same kind and shape, as here, or it may be an alternating pattern of two or more types of stones and beads to create a focal strand to draw the eye. With others, the most important part of the design may appear at either end, around a less flamboyant center. With still others, the salient aspect of their identity may rest in graduated sizes or colors, or particular bad shapes and sizes. What they hold in common is the memory wire on which they are strung.
Memory wire is the one material Wings uses that is not sterling silver (or another precious or semi-precious metal); instead, it’s made of stainless steel. He tried creating coils with a sterling silver version several years ago, and it proved to be simply and utterly unworkable: It has no capacity for tension and does not possess sufficient flexibility or strength to hold its shape, and the weight of the beads, even the smallest ones, stretch the coil entirely out of shape. Stainless steel, on the other hand, is the same color, and can be specially treated to create such tensile capabilities. Treated and then coiled tightly, it retains its spring, and thus its shape, and will expand or contract to fit virtually any size wrist. Although the manufacturing process differs somewhat, simply put, memory wire is a Slinky, cut finely and smoothly enough to use in jewelry.
But back to this particular bracelet: This one was built around the four focal beads in the middle of the strand, those four stunning kyanite barrels, ice blue and filled with inclusions like stardust — small comets arcing across the wire’s center. The challenge was to build the coil outward from there, entirely in shades of blue.
As a general principle, it usually works best to keep the largest beads at the center, graduating outward to the smallest beads at either end. There are exceptions, of course, particularly when small beads are used as spacers, but by far the majority tend to follow this basic guideline. It keeps the coil balanced.
Wings’s inventory of beads at that time contained two varieties of blue agate: a collection of pale, icy blue lace agate rounds, old hand-cut beads that were nearly white in color; and a small group of rare Ellensburg blue agate, which manifests in an electric cornflower blue shade with only very faint banding, in virtually the same size and shape. Because of the icy, luminous nature of the blue lace agate (and because of the shades that would appear nearer either end), he elected to move outward from light to dark, and so began by flanking the kyanite first with a like number of blue lace agate beads on either side, then following suit with the Ellensburg blue agate.
These three sets of beads occupied roughly three-fifths of the coil’s length, all working outward from the center. Next, he planned to move to smaller rounds in a much more brilliant color. But such a transition would be too abrupt; it needed an intermediary to make the shades and shapes flow.
And so, Wings followed the largish Ellensburg blue agate rounds with beads of roughly the same size, but a very different shape and shade: doughnut-style rondels (which are just what they sound like, roughly doughnut-shaped, with round puffy edges and flat tops and bottoms, around the drilled holes) in a frosty, opaque aquamarine shade of kyanite. It pulled together the stones at the center, linking them squarely to the midpoints of either side of the coil, and provided the perfect segue into the remaining to segments of graduated rounds, both intensely hued: one a deep, rich almost pure blue; the other a distinctly teal blue.
The larger of the two, and the next segment following the rondels, were small round beads of highly polished lapis lazuli. These were stunning in color and matrix pattern: the stone itself hovered somewhere between cobalt and violet blues; some beads were nearly free of matrix, others whorled with shimmering pyrite, and still others patched here and there in rounded shapes with creamy white, creating an effect of snow against the deepest blues of a winter night. These flowed toward either end, where segments of very small rounds of beautiful teal blue kyanite, like the needles of a lush blue spruce, served as anchor beads.
Beads strung, all the remained was to turn the wire at either end to close the strand and keep the beads secure, then to bless it and send it on its way. It was not, perhaps, precisely a “Blue Gravity,” but it was true to it in spirit: earth and sky linked together by stardust and snow in the blue shades of winter.
~ Aji
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