Five thousand years of courage, in warm orange-red. Size 9.5.
Carnelian has been worn for at least five thousand years, and I think about that every time I set a piece of it. It is the stone of ancient courage — soldiers carried it, Romans sealed letters with it — and this one is a warm orange-red square where the light goes into the stone rather than bouncing off.
The bronze is the part I want you to notice. I set small bronze balls at each corner instead of silver, so warm metal meets warm stone and nothing cools the color down. Mixing bronze into silver work means soldering at different temperatures and being ruthless about the order of operations, because one wrong sequence and you undo the joint you just made.
It came together over a couple of evenings, mostly spent waiting for metal to cool before I dared touch the next corner.
It wears earthy and confident, with something faintly antique about it — not costume-antique, just old in feeling.
