Thread by @WingsNDNSilver

It's #ThrowbackThursday at The NDN Silver Blog, with a work commissioned by one of our dearest friends for another, a piece intended not precisely to replace something lost, but rather to accompany the wearer in a journey of renewal: wingssilverwork.com/throwbackthurs….

This was a commissioned piece from something a little under two years ago. One of my dearest friends asked me to have Wings create this for a different friend, one who had previously worn one of Wings's coils.

I say "previously," because it was lost, along with virtually all of her material possessions, and her home, in the NorCal wildfires in late 2018.

The previous one embodied love, and dreams. Going forward, she would need plenty of both.

She had liked this one, shown above, for its nuggety mix of textures and its elemental colors, a blend of water and fire.

Our friend wanted the new version to draw on the spirit of the lost one, but not to replicate it; rather, it was to capture the spirit of a life renewed.

And so we went to work.

This piece began not with the creation of the new, but rather, with a symbolic dissection of the old.

Given the circumstances, anything reminiscent of fire itself was not a good choice, so we jettisoned the reds, the garnet & strawberry quartz, entirely.

That left us with blues and grays. Ironically, the gray in the old one was a stone that manifests, very literally, as the product of intense heat: hematite. And yet, in the way we symbolically assign temperature to color, its silvery gray seemed cool. Healing.

And, of course, hematite is said, in some circles, to be a stone of healing. Some folks wear it around the wrists or knees, as an aid to tamping down the inflammation of arthritis. Does it work?

Who knows? But it does have a healing association.

And, of course, so does water. So do friendship and love.

And it just so happened that Wings had in his inventory a different set of hematite beads: very old, expert lapidary work, solid . . . and acquired from the same friend commissioning this piece.

They, along with some other strands, had belonged to her late mother. These were all old beads: hand-knotted; solid, untreated, natural gemstones; the kind of hand-wrought, one0by-one lapidary work you don't find much anymore. These hematite beads were solid. Substantial.

And given their provenance, they seemed the perfect focal point for this piece: heat, cooling over time, aided by the wind and waters, into something strong and solid and unquestionably beautiful. Something healing.

He would use another set of beads from that same source in this coil, too: blue lace agate rounds, old and natural and fantastically lacy. The third set of large rounds came from another source, but also rare: Ellensburg blue agate, known for its perfect cornflower blue color.

These three segments were interspersed with cooling shades like the storm and the waters: translucent amethyst chips; deep violet sugilite nuggets; marbled blue and white sodalite; deep cobalt blue rounds of lapis lazuli with shimmering silver pyrite webbing.

As the post itself puts it, the waters of surface and sky, a raining, rippling promise of rebirth.

It's one of a kind, and will stay that way.

Of course, if the style speaks to your spirit, Wings can create a version uniquely and wholly your own; inquire via the form here: wingssilverwork.com/contact/.

Our full current inventory begins with the menu bars at left here (if they don't show, try turning your device sideways): wingssilverwork.com.

And our local economy is shut down completely, so we can use all the shares and testimonials we can get.