No. 58 — made once
Alfazema
62 pounds
Buy this piece
There is one. When it is bought, this page stays as its record.
Continue to secure payment- Tracked UK delivery included
- Repairs by the maker
- 14-day returns
- Premium packaging
Details
- Reference
- cora-0058
- Construction
- Wire-linked by hand — every bead turned onto its own eye-pin and closed
Delivery
Tracked UK delivery is included in the price. UK law applies to your order, and we pay any import fees ourselves wherever we are permitted to prepay them; where we are not, the carrier will collect them from you on delivery. Every piece arrives in a linen pouch inside premium packaging. See theshipping and returns pagefor handling and transit times.
Returns and repair
Fourteen days to return it, and repairs done by the maker herself — because every link is turned and closed by hand, a single link can be reopened and repaired without disturbing the rest of the strand.
O God, my God, to thee do I watch at break of day. For thee my soul hath thirsted;
About this piece
Alfazema is the lavender along the wall, the row that gets cut for drying every year whether anyone asks for it or not. The run is the palest violet Claudia works, almost white in a strong light, with amber notes and small dark spacers to keep it from turning sweet. It is for prayer at first light rather than last.
Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire link and closed by hand. At this pallor a single warm note carries a long way, so there are only a few of them and each was placed on purpose. Made once, and not made again.
Clear light
The clear pieces are the ones that change most between one room and the next. Cut faces do not hold a colour of their own so much as borrow one: against a white curtain in the middle of the day they go almost invisible, and the whole strand reads as a line of light with a shadow under it. Move to a lamp and they warm up. Hold one against a window at the end of the afternoon and the faces throw small coloured marks onto whatever is behind them. Nothing about that is an effect Claudia added. It is what happens when something faceted is held up in a room with a window in it, and it is the reason this is the largest group in the collection.
It is also the most various. A clear run can be pushed almost anywhere by what is set into it, and the pieces here go a long way apart. One is nearly colourless with two pale blue notes where holy water would be, and it is the lightest thing on the bench. One shifts bead by bead from blue-green to amber and back, so that no two neighbours match and the eye never settles. One is the deepest violet she works, cut so that it takes light instead of swallowing it. One alternates deep wine with near-clear the whole way round, which makes it read as something half-lit — the right condition for a season spent waiting. One carries a name in lettered beads. They have almost nothing in common except that light gets through them.
That is worth knowing before you choose. A clear piece is the one to pick if you pray somewhere with a window: at a kitchen table in the morning, in a car, in a pew near the aisle. It is not the one to pick if the piece will live in a pocket and be told in the dark, where a heavier, plainer strand gives the fingers more to go on.
They are also unforgiving to make. Cut faces this small show every link that is not square to the next one, so the whole run has to be turned to a single angle and any link that drifts gets reopened. Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire and closed by hand, is a long way to hold one angle.
Care and blessing
Your rosary arrives unblessed. A blessing is given freely by a priest and costs nothing — it is not ours to sell, and it never will be.
What you have paid for is the making, and the hours it took.