Fluffy Flopping Jedi + Chained to the Bench/Desk

Spring here is now Jedi season as baby barred owls Leia and Rey have emerged from the hollow in my neighbor’s nesting tree that looks like it was drawn by E. H. Shepard for a Winnie the Pooh story. Learning to fly is no easy task even if you’re born with wings. The landing part seems to be as tricky as the actual flying, so there is quite a bit of falling, missing branches and landing on the ground. Before venturing outside or letting our dogs into the back yard, we must search for fluffy, flopping, Jedi owlets, lest we be attacked by their ever vigilant parents Simon and Daphne who keep them safe.

Naming privileges remain with the nesting tree’s custodian, so I can’t claim credit for last year’s adorable pair of fledgelings, Scooby and Shaggy, or this year’s precious pair Leia and Rey though I heartily approve! Leia is fearless, testing her wings along with her parents’ watchfulness. Rey is more reticent, fly-flopping and falling out of tress much closer to home.

In the midst of preparing for my 35th anniversary retrospective, I’ve been carving out some time at the bench for sanity. I’m literally researching my own decades long body of work, getting all the details and provenance of the selected artwork into one place. It can be tough to feel like this is a celebration when the tool I use the most is my Mac’s keyboard instead of an interesting hammer, so it’s important for me to keep my hands in the work for which all this other work is in service.

After finishing a ring to be revealed later this summer as part of the book and exhibition, I jumped back into the zen-like task of making chains and prepping two other rings for their final stages. This 2-Directional, Double Weave loop-in-loop chain (sometimes called a Roman or a foxtail chain) is composed of 22 gauge, fine silver links that I form and fuse closed individually before squashing them into the long shapes that I can weave from two directions to form the chain. In progress, it weaves as a square chain that I will hammer and draw into a round, tightly woven pattern.

I assembly line the process as much as possible for speed and efficiency – as if a handmade chain pattern that is thousands of years old could have anything to do with speed – though I get bored doing just one task, so after an hour or two I weave whatever links I’ve prepared. This pattern averages 22 of these links per inch. Yes, it’s my idea of fun!

There are slightly faster ways of weaving a chain that look similar, such as a double weave Viking knit, but no other chain has the solid, even, dense roundness of this pattern that gives the perfect shape to any pendant suspended from it.

You may recognize the ring on the left from a previous newsletter. It now sits among its pieces of 24 karat gold foil, awaiting the magic of eutectic bonding when I will do keum boo in some of the recessed shapes formed by the granules. The other ring awaits its blue chrysoprase set in the bezel. Watch this space…