Another faint dusting of snow in the dark hours of this morning — just enough to send a fall of water cascading off the deck when the sun rose high enough to melt it. Sice then, it’s been a mix of sun and clouds, more sun than not, and another small flurry while the sun shone its brightest.
Now, the precipitation is gone with such little ground cover as we had, the wind is rising, and the clouds seem ready to coalesce once more. There’s still plenty of blue visible, but more gray and white, with the winds now beginning begin the work of weaving once-blue skies into medicine.
And medicine it most certainly is. Despite the drought, we have had just enough late snow and rain to keep the earth soft, new green shoots already rising proudly from it. There will, of course, be more of winter yet to come before spring takes hold once and for all, but it feels as though we might be past the point at which a hard freeze will destroy all that has broken through so far. [Not, I should point out, past the point at which a hard freeze will finish off fruit blossoms or buds, but thankfully for the moment, it’s still too early for those.]
But this is the time of year that lays the groundwork for the blossoms’ arriving, their surviving and thriving. It requires a soft and fertile earth, which in turn requires skies capable of delivering precipitation. And while it may not be much in historical terms, what we have seems, for the moment, to be just enough.
As I write, the swatches of visible blue grow smaller in a sky webbed by clouds that are increasingly dark. It appears that the forecast may be right after all, and there may be snow tonight.
It’s a sky, and newly-growing earth, reminiscent of the stones and silver that this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work comprise. It’s a work that dates back not quite three full months, and it’s one close to my heart: It’s a pair of hand-made barrettes, one of Wings’s gifts to me at Christmas.
The genesis of this particular gift lay in another pair, one that a dear friend of ours had just commissioned. She has complete sets of his work, built around various stones and shades, including barrettes; like me, she has long, thick, heavy hair. She had come to realize that she had none that were hand-milled instead and stamped, and she had none that were the bright clear blue of Sleeping Beauty turquoise, so she asked him to create a pair for her set with that stone. I’ve actually featured that pair here in this space; you can see the photos and read about them here.
While Wings was creating her pair (and this was in the weeks leading up to Christmas), it suddenly occurred to him that he had never created a millwork pair for me, either (although he has made numerous stampwork versions, both singly and in a pair, and some of them set with turquoise). And so he settled on the idea as one of the gifts he would create for me, albeit one in a very different design.
He had already made me a pair of small stampwork barrettes set with turquoise, the kind that one would use to hold individual locks of hair rather than the entire mass. You can see and read about that pair here, and while I love them, they’re [intentionally] too small to use to hold all my hair in a single ponytail. He decided that this pair should be larger and cut them accordingly. Cranking them through the rolling mill to transfer the looping floral pattern, besides being heavy labor, also displaces the silver in the process, thinning it out very slightly, the extra silver spreading outward on all sides and expanding the base of the piece.
Here, he milled it first, then cut it in half and rounded off all the corners, filing all the edges smooth. Domed lightly as they appear here, they are roughly three inches long by 7/8 of an inch high, and as is clear below, that’s more than enough to hold a full-size French clip assembly.
And they are quite literal French clips; he only buys the ones imported from France, because he says that they hold more securely and last much longer. Apparently he’s right, because I still have working barrettes that he made for me nearly two decades ago., and my hair is extremely heavy.
Once they were shaped and the clip assembly soldered securely to the backs, then he turned his attention to the surfaces and the stones. he had settled on a matched pair of square blue spiderweb turquoise cabochons for these: of unknown provenance, perhaps from Arizona or Nevada, or perhaps from China, but beautifully hard material in a rich blue somewhere between dark sky and teal, with fine inky black webbing throughout and smooth beveled surfaces. [They are actually substantially more blue than they render on-screen here, closer to sky than to teal, and he knew that I loved the patterning on them.] He fashioned square bezels for them, plain and low-profile, nothing to distract either from the stone or from the millwork beneath, soldering them securely to the top center of each barrette. All that remained was to oxidize the millwork and the joins of bezel and barrette, then buff them to a medium-high finish, not quite mirror-like, but not far off it, either.
I cut all my hair off a couple of years, a long-overdue rite we observe in times of grief. It had been down to my waist, and I had it shorn into a pixie cut, keeping it that way for a year or more. Now, it’s begun growing out again, the longest part of it a bit below my shoulders. In other words, it’s at exactly that unmanageable length — still too short to braid properly, too heavy for a comfortable ponytail, and yet long enough to be thoroughly in my way when I’m trying to work. I’ve taken to the time-honored method of getting it out of my face by tying it into a ponytail, then clipping it up on the back of my head.
But when I don’t want the messiness of a clip? These are what I use. They’re the perfect size to hold the entire ponytail to the back of my hair, and I typically place them in a vertical column, one aligned directly above the other. It provides a bit of silver flash, and a bit of blue sky, too.
For hands now hobbled by rheumatoid arthritis and sense of patience daily overloaded with far too much to do, they’re perfect. In that regard, they work a bit like the combination of wind and clouds weaving once-blue skies into medicine.
Medicine that is, at this moment, falling from skies now entirely gray, another flurry of snow for a land in need of it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
