Today’s featured throwback doesn’t go back very far, actually; a mere five months, virtually to the day. It was a piece specially commissioned by a dear friend, part of a small series of hair cuffs that she had asked Wings to make for her to add to her personal collection.
Although it had been commissioned some months prior, it was produced in the heart of autumn. Even so, the shade of the stone and the shape of the symbols that held it always put me in more in mind of spring: bold lines among lighter colors, hinting at the lively seasons to come, a subtle yet strong evocation of the path of the light.
At the time that Wings began this piece, he had four separate hair cuffs in the works for our friend. The size and shape of the silver itself would be fairly standardized among them, the only variation slight and of the sort that occurs naturally among works made entirely by hand. The stones had already by chosen by our friend from among a selection of the various colors and types that wanted for these pieces, a selection of each I had photographed and sent to her so that she could decide which ones most appealed to her: hawk’s eye; lapis lazuli; two different kinds of turquoise, one of spectacularly high grade black-webbed Kingman and the other of a more classic shape and style, robin’s-egg but well-matrixed. This was the stone chosen from the last of those four categories, and Wings needed to create a cuff substantial enough to support it while still allowing its natural beauty to hold center stage.
In terms of execution (as with most things), creation of a hair cuff necessarily begins with the silver. It begins, in fact, in two relatively shapeless dimensions: a piece of flat sheet silver from which the cuff will be cut, stamped, filed, and only then shaped. And so, Wings cut it to size, freehand; rounded the corners off by hand and smoothed the edges with a file, and kept it flat for the moment to design the stampwork.
If memory serves, this one began with the center stamps, two deep hearts set in opposition at the top and bottom of the cuff. These were created with a stamp sufficiently large and three-dimensional, and strikes sufficiently deep, to create a repoussé-like effect in the stamped hearts themselves — domed slightly in the center to produce tangible depth and a roundness of surface.
For the next step, you will need to imagine the cuff unformed as yet, still lying flat on the surface of his workbench. He took a stamp with a plain chisel end and placed it roughly 3/16 of an inch inward from the edge, then used it to score a solid line up and down on either side, creating a narrow border. He then turned the piece ninety degrees, so that the border of the first side lay horizontally in front of him. Directly atop it, he stamped a chased row of images consisting of an inverted thunderhead with the rays of a sun rising from beneath and within it — a complex design evoked from a few bold cuts in the stamps end, one with obvious symbolic significance. He then turned it 180 degrees so that the opposite edge lay in front of him, and repeated the process with the same imagery.
Lastly for this stage, he chose a tiny round stamp, one whose end tapered nearly to a fine point, and hammered its dot pattern repeatedly into each border between score line and edge. It created texture, depth, and a slightly aged look and feel. It also evoked the symbolic possibilities of a sun rising above either land or water, cutting the path of the light through storm and night toward what would, once the stone was set, be a safe blue center flanked by cross-cultural symbols of love and life itself.
Before he could turn to the stone, though, there was more silverwork to be done.
On a piece as starkly shaped as a hair cuff (and this is also frequently the case with cuff bracelets and rings), no bezel can be created until the curvature of this piece is set. This is because there is only so much give in metal; soldering a bezel onto flat silver and then bending it will only result in the solder breaking apart and the setting falling off the piece. So metalsmiths do the shaping first, then figure out what will be needed to ensure the stone’s setting — and, in this case, the prong on the reverse side — can be attached securely and permanently.
As I’ve written before about these pieces:
The mechanism by which a hair cuff works is a prong on the back; a ponytail holder or rubber band can be wrapped around it and then around the lock or braid of hair, holding the hair in place within the arc of the cuff, with the exterior arc (i.e., the smooth side featuring stamped silver and/or a focal stone) turned outward.
Wings fashions these prongs at a very slight angle, to introduce tension into the metal’s placement so that they will hold more securely. In this instance, he effected it by way of a small length of sterling silver faceted wire, cut just slightly shorter than the cuff itself and tapered to a point at one end, then soldered securely to the inner top of the cuff at the other.
And this time, as is clear from the image below, he forgot something.
Normally, he stamps his hallmark and the “Sterling” notation on the back of a piece early in its creation, while the sheet silver is still flat. It is, after all, impossible to stamp words on a tightly curved arc. You also don’t want to risk, depending upon the weight and gauge of the silver, any hint of the hallmark or notation showing through on the other side. But this time, probably as a result of the distractions that accrue naturally to moving through four separate pieces more or less simultaneously, he forgot. And so, he scribed both notations by hand on the inner band of the cuff.
At last, it would be time to turn to the stone and its setting.
With deeply curved pieces, it’s often not possible to solder a bezel directly onto the surface, for the very reasons noted above. This is true, for example, of anticlastic cuff bracelets, where the piece arcs in two opposing ways: the regular curvature of band around wrist, and the upswing of the top and bottom edges of the band itself, turning its center into a concavity of sorts. You can see an example of these opposing arcs in the cuff shown here (and an example of a similar solution to the problem, too).
The way to get around this seeming limitation in what is often a striking and spectacularly beautiful design is simple conceptually, but a little more complex in the execution. It involves using a tiny length of hollow sterling silver tubing, cut to size and soldered into the center of the spot where the stone should appear. The bezel is then created, and the center of its backing soldered securely onto the top of the the tubing. It gets tricky: You want to elevate the stone and its setting sufficiently that it will not rest directly on the arc of the silverwork piece beneath it, but not so much that tubing and gap are clearly visible from the surface, distracting from the whole of the design. In this instance, Wings cut the tubing to a vanishingly small fraction of an inch, perhaps no more than an eighth, and soldered it into place. By now, he would have created the bezel, which in this case consisted of a flat silver oval cut slightly larger than outer edge of the stone, a gently scalloped bezel soldered inward from the edge by a millimeter or two, that gap then filled with twisted silver wrapped all the way around the bezel to accent it. These three pieces, melded together, he then attached to the top of the tubing. Only at this point could he set the stone.
And the stone was a truly remarkable specimen. It was one of a few he acquired some years ago, all of roughly similar shape and relative size. The one that appears in the buckle of yesterday’s featured work, his all-new traditional butterfly concha belt, was a part of the group from which this stone came. They were unlabeled as to provenance, beyond specifying that they were natural American turquoise, but based on color and matrix pattern, we believe that they come from the old Montezuma Mine in Nevada. It was known for producing stone in a perfect, archetypal shade of turquoise, ranging from robin’s-egg blue to the “sky blue” found in the old Crayola 64-crayon “Big Box.” It’s also known for bold matrix patterns in a rusty, coppery red-brown shade, manifesting striking patches around large expanses of blue and delicately complex spiderwebbing that trails across it like fine clouds across the southwest sky. This cabochon was slightly more blue than it appears in the images above, and contained unusually fine spiderwebbing in almost orbicular patterns across its surface.
The stone, a Skystone, was in fact a beautiful representation of the desert sky, the paler blues of spring matrixed with the lines of a passing storm and underlit with the glow of the nascent sun. Coupled with the symbolism along the sides of the hair cuff, it did indeed seem to bring into focus the path of the light, emergent from the deep dark of winter to herald the long days and warm winds of the summer to come.
~ Aji
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