Sapphire & Celestine: A Statement Jewelry Piece

It began with an image of the sea and the sky and a walk through a Munich tradefair…

It was the strand of raw facetted saphires that caught our eyes as we oggled over the beauty of the stones in front of us.

We were at the Munich tradefair looking for stones for my current and future projects. Little did I know that we were about to stumble upon the piece that would lead me to make a statement jewelry piece of epic color and fabulous presence.

I sourced these with the woman who would eventually become the owner of this piece. She had actually come with me to help keep me from overspending my budget…which is very easy to do there…and then we saw these sapphires. She loved them immediately. And thus the commission was born.

Sapphire is corundum, one of the hardest minerals on earth, a nine on the Mohs scale, second only to diamond. I’ve always thought that hardness carries a meaning beyond the physical: for me, sapphire represents a certain enduring inner strength and confidence. A bit of elegance, a bit of classic style, it’s a stone that gives both bold and calm.

We held onto that gorgeous, facetted strand of blue for two years. Not because we didn’t know what to do with them, but because we did: we were waiting for the right centerpiece to find it’s way to us. You can’t rush that part. A statement jewelry piece needs to find it’s center at the right time because forcing it never ends well.

The stone that looks like a cloud…

The centerpiece, when it finally came, was a cluster of celestine: a druzy formation of pale, sky-colored crystals that looks exactly like what its name promises: something celestial. Something that belongs more to the sky than to the earth.

Celestine forms in sedimentary environments, often in evaporite deposits: ancient seawater and mineral-rich groundwater, concentrated over time until strontium and sulfate precipitate out as crystal. Madagascar produces the finest specimens, though celestine is also found in Ohio, Mexico, Spain, and Sicily. It is a soft stone, only a 3 to 3.5 on the Mohs scale, which meant that next to the sapphires, I was working with one of the hardest minerals I use and one of the softest, side by side in a single piece.

That contrast is exactly what drew me to it. Earth and sky. Sea and air. Something ancient and something that looks like it’s still floating.

I set the faceted sapphire discs with tiny cube-shaped hematite seed beads between them, and finished the piece as a collier, closed in sterling silver. It became one of my favorite statement jewelry pieces I’ve ever made.

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Why I only do selective commissions…

I only make a few commissioned pieces. Working on commission means someone else’s expectations enter the process, and there’s always a risk that the constraints placed on me shrink what the piece could have been.

This one was different, because I’ve known this collector a long time. She gave me the space to do my work without trying to direct it: she trusts the art, not just the outcome. That trust is rare, and I don’t take it for granted. She is one of my favorite collectors of the statement jewelry pieces I make, and this necklace exists because of that relationship as much as because of the stones.

When I brought the finished piece to her, her eyes went wide, and she put it on right there. I watched something settle in her, that particular kind of stillness: the good kind, the kind that tells you the piece has landed exactly where it was meant to. That’s the moment my job as an artist is finished. The art has spoken, and the piece already belongs to her.

The care in wearing a wearable artwork…

This statement jewelry necklace pairs one of the hardest stones I work with against one of the softest, which means it asks for real care. It is art first, jewelry second. She’ll be mindful of how she moves in it: no embracing that presses against the neck, no exercise, no swimming, nothing like a theme park ride where the piece could catch or take an impact. The sapphire will outlast almost anything. The celestine will not forgive being knocked against something hard.

That’s part of what makes a piece like this worth having, though. It asks you to be present with it: to remember, every time you put it on, that you’re wearing something the earth spent a very long time making, and that someone spent two years waiting to get right.

Lisa Marie Armstrong is a jewelry artist making one-of-a-kind wearable art from her studio on Lake Zurich. Each piece is built from real stones and worked by hand.