Cold Journey: sterling silver, copper, 14k gold, methyst Sage Agate, white USA topaz.

We have often heard the term, “when hell freezes over;” well, here in the deep South it has.  And, it befits the occasion that I should have finished up four weeks worth of labor on this piece the very night that the devil has to wear a jacket.

Steam casting was used to make the center section.  I was wanting to utilize the ease of carving into the wax as opposed to carving the metal directly, as I often do.  But, by carving the wax, I can get greater depth of 3-dimensions in my designs.  The rest of this piece was hand fabricated.

When this agate is slabbed it looks like a snowscape with banks of snow and dead grasses sticking out of the snow peaks.  But, I resisted the urge to use the picturesque qualities of this agate, and I was thrilled with the way it looks when I cut these into tubes.  But, my greatest challenge here was setting these tubes.  I soldered on the copper structures to hold the stones, and I twisted the top ones.  This way I could push the smaller tapered ends through and then twist them back so that the stone could slip into its cup holder bottom.  The first (right) went in like a charm, but the left one was a bugger.  I had to re-cut that one four times before I got it to work without breaking.

The topaz in the center was faceted by a good friend of mine in Oklahoma, Byron McCurtain.  I have been setting on a parcel of these beautiful stones, but was not sure where to use such a brilliant but colorless stone in my work.  My plan was to use one of my North Carolina rubies, but as I pulled together my materials for this one, I realized that this one was going to have a very cold color scheme, and the white USA topaz fit in very well.  The 20g piece of 14k gold serves as fulcrum for the piece; whereas, a ruby would have over powered the other colors and left the gold almost unnoticed.

It was just by luck that I was able to put the final polish on this one last night as snow started to fall from the southern skies.  And, this morning I had to trade my normal sandals in for a pair of shoes, brrr, it is very cold.  I even had to dig an old coat out of storage.  The stores all closed, the schools were closed, and the national guard was called in to keep order as the snow dissolved seconds before it hit the ground.  We are just not very prepared down here to deal with this phenomena of snow.  And, I am not sure we shut everything down out of fear or celebration :o)  So, here is my tribute to snow in hell.  May the force be with you.

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