No. 44 — made once
Rosa Mística
70 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-0044
- 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.
I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys.
About this piece
Rosa Mística — Mystic Rose — is one of the oldest titles in the litany, and the one that sounds least like a title and most like a description. Claudia set a deep pink at every turn so the pale run is interrupted the way a hedge interrupts a field, and hung a worked figure at the end of it. It is a piece for a feast rather than an ordinary Tuesday.
Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire link and closed by hand. The figure at the end is the most worked thing on the piece and the reason it takes longer than its neighbours. Made once, and not made again.
White, and the feasts
White is the colour the church puts on when it has something to celebrate. It belongs to Christmas and to Easter, to the feasts of Our Lady, to a baptism, a first communion, a confirmation, a wedding, and — this surprises people the first time they see it — to a funeral, because the Latin church buries its dead in the colour of the resurrection rather than the colour of mourning. Wherever white appears in the calendar, the church is saying the same thing: that this day is not an ordinary day.
A pale run behaves differently in the hand from a dark one. It shows every fingerprint and every crooked link, so there is nowhere to hide a piece of careless work, and it takes the colour of whatever room it is in — warm under a lamp, almost grey under an overcast window, and briefly luminous when a low sun comes through a curtain. That last is how these were photographed, and it is the closest thing to how they look in a church at ten in the morning.
The pale pieces in this collection are all built the same way and read very differently, because a single note of colour carries further against white than against anything else. On one, a green mark at every turn is enough to change the whole mood of it. On another, a deep blue arriving at the larger beads is the only colour there is, and it is plenty. On a third, a deep pink interrupts the run the way a hedge interrupts a field. None of these is decoration. In a strand meant to be told with the eyes shut, a change of colour is a change of texture, and a change of texture is how the hand knows where it has got to.
These are the pieces people buy for somebody else, and for a particular day. If you are choosing for a confirmation or a first communion and want to be traditional without being obvious, this is where to look first. They are also the easiest of Claudia’s pieces to live with afterwards, because white does not argue with anything.
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.