This pendant got its name for two reasons.

After cutting and polishing the stone, I thought for quite a lot of time about what I wanted to do with. I spent hours, over several days, making sketches and planning out how I would go about making a mounting for it.

Also, at the same time, I had come up with a poem, the title of which would eventually become the name of this pendant. It took many hours to get it all put together.

The stone is chapinite. I was never really sure if that was the actual name of the stone or something the mineralogist I was working for at the time had simply made up. But basically, it is a brecciated yellow jasper. Brecciated means that the jasper broke into pieces at some point in its past and then the spaces filled in with something else. In this case, it’s always seemed to me that the filler is chalcedony.

This pendant is available for purchase at https://www.etsy.com/listing/1867876651/a-many-are-the-hours-one-of-a-kind?click_key=d18abeb74441bcf96772ae286d79388e23ccf1da%3A1867876651&click_sum=8edc95ad&ref=shop_home_active_4

I decided to bezel mount the stone to a sterling silver back plate. I wanted to add a copper accent but didn’t want to solder it. When you heat sterling silver, you get a lot of what is called fire scale. It’s a black residue that is a result mainly of the copper that is added to silver to make it sterling. Sterling silver is labeled 925 because it is 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper.

Anyway, when you heat copper it gets a huge amount of fire scale. The pickle (an acid) that you soak silver and copper in after heating gets rid of a lot of it leaving behind a white coating that has to be polished off. So I decided to cold connect the copper to the sterling back plate with sterling rivets.

The very back of the piece has a swirled finish on it. That’s mainly because I am not all that good at polishing. If I had more patience for it, I’d probably be better at it.

The bail is a commercially made bail. But I do also make a lot of my own findings:  bails, clasps, headpins and the like.

The poem that is now part of this pendant follows:

Many are the hours

Sat by fires

In my youth

Raising golden starlight

Glowing embers

Flew aloft

Truths were spoke in whispers

In the dark and

Quiet night

Softly asked were questions

That were answered

Often not

How to tell the larva

Of what is yet

Before it

Or butterfly the truth

How fleeting is

The daylight

Ranged there now before me

Smiling faces ripe

With questions

Answers, I have many

But to give them

I will not

Let them quest their own quests

Learning lessons

Living life

Myst’ry lies in ashes

From the dying

Comes rebirth

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