IMPORTANT: This strand is Ready to Ship. It will leave the studio in 1 - 5 business days. It is irreplaceable and for this reason we strongly recommend Express Shipping with signature required upon delivery to make sure it arrives safely into your hands. 

If you purchase this item with any other jewel, please be aware that our jewelry is handmade to order and takes approximately 6-8 weeks to create before shipping, meaning your Ready to Ship jewel will ship with the rest of your order. This cuts down on multiple shipping costs for you, and unnecessary waste for the environment. If you would like this Ready to Ship jewel sooner than the rest of your order, please reach out to us via email. 

This new version one of our classics finds hand strung graduated silver sheen obsidian and onyx beads making the "shape" of the infamous Halley's Comet that makes itself known every 75 years or so to the human eye on its solitary journey through the cosmos. Because of this, it is the only comet that can be viewed by people twice in their lifetimes. The next scheduled time for it to be making its way near Earth and able to be viewed is 2061. 

This strand is composed of faceted Silver Sheen Obsidian spheres, onyx spheres, and spinel. A mini version of our recently released ' Key of Solitude' clasps each side of the strand together, acting as both the 'lock' and the mechanism which 'unlocks' the strand. Composed of cast bat bones, it suggests the ability to 'see in the dark' whilst in the thick of grief, or while journeying through the unknown realms of hibernation while alone.  

Silver Sheen Obsidian:

Silver Sheen Obsidian is a natural stone made of polished volcanic glass from Mexico. These beads are dark in color but have beautiful flashes of silver when turned, that resemble the moon going through her many phases, or tiny galaxies teeming with space dust. 

Onyx:

Onyx is best known for being a natural stone that act as a kind of 'psychic armor' against the negativity of others. It is also used to sooth grief and heartbreak. They are wonderful grounding stones and stones of self mastery, enabling its wearers to have mental and spiritual focus.

Spinel:

Spinel is a potent stone for healing and protection: working to help clear intense emotions such as anger and rage, it imbues its wearer with a sense of calm. It is also used to heal the physical body and has powerful metaphysical qualities, helping its wearer to feel strong, assisting with perseverance, especially when dealing with issues from the past that have become difficult to overcome. Much like Onyx, it also helps repel negativity from others.

As a natural stone, clarity and color varies; each bead has been hand selected for its quality.. 

Please keep in mind that these beads are ‘earth made’ and then each one is hand cut and hand formed. You will see the earth’s inclusions inside and outside each sphere. Nothing is imperfect to me. I see evidence of a jeweler’s or a stone cutter’s hand and I think of Rodin, and how his sculptures included the evidence of his hands - from a hundred plus years ago - and how that connects me and my team, to this lineage of hand-making, in a time when machinated ‘perfect’ work is becoming more and more normalized. I am trying to resist this idea of ‘perfection’, and I implore the same of you. These are all hand made, and earth made beautiful objects, so inherently, by today’s standards, they are ‘imperfect’ - because humans had their hands, and more importantly, their hearts on them.

The photographs accurately portray the quality of the stones and the cuts. 

This strand measures approximately 47 inches long from end to end. At its closure is our new Key Clasp cast in sterling silver. This clasp is tactile in nature making it easily held between the tips of your fingers and rubbed for comfort in times of grief, anxiety, dissociation, as well as during moments of joy and wonder.  

Keys: 

Skeleton keys have long been an obsession of mine. My godmother is an auctioneer and took me along to auctions and estate sales. Treasure for me were always the wooden boxes filled with greasy and dirt caked keys, beautiful with their time earned patina, with their memories and silent stories.   As a kid, I imagined every beautiful key I came across no matter how small or large, belonged to a haunted house. Even the tiny keys that came with my school fair diary were special to me. Keys have that sort of resiliency that many other sorts of old objects don’t, they survive the wear and tear of misuse, they surface like relics from the muck of time. 

Keys are an ancient tool, created first by the Ancient Egyptians in wood and modified by the Romans in metal and made small enough to be kept on a person, coined as the first ‘skeleton keys’. These were used, as now, to lock doors and boxes or 'safes', to protect precious objects and people. Thusly one of the mundane and ubiquitous tool has also come to garner potent symbolism over time and has been woven into a current everyday object that even digital technology can’t seem to make obsolete. At the time of my writing this, I still use metal keys to gain entrance to my apartment and studio; I moved out of a house in Philadelphia in 2020 in one of the oldest parts of the city that still employed the use of skeleton keys. Perhaps the key is an object where the old world and the new continually shoulder up against each other, no matter how much modern technology tries to replace them.

As a talismanic jewel the key is a liminal object representing a potent tension and duality as it can both lock and unlock, making the person who holds the key one on a threshold.

*For locking: Being able to lock something behind you will always give the power and feeling of protection, therefore keys will always have the symbolism of protection embedded in them. The first key I can remember owning was a tiny key that fit to a tiny lock that latched onto a diary I owned in elementary school where I kept all of my secrets. This consisted of all of the titles of the books I’d write, but they sounded like spells, things I desperately wanted to change about myself; revenge I’d like to take on bullies. These days, protecting my loved ones, my heart, and extending protection to those I can feels most important to me. Feeling safe and helping others feel safe in my presence is something I'm always thinking about, and the presence of a key against my body helps remind me of these tenants and makes me feel safe.

For unlocking: Keys as objects that can 'unlock' show up as symbols across cultures. It’s a symbol of gaining access: for some it's about knowledge and wisdom or about gaining access to higher or unearthly realms: Saint Peter was known to hold the keys to heaven while Hecate is known to hold the keys to the unseen world/ the gates of death. As an initiatory symbol, it suggests garnering levels of knowledge that lead upwards on your path, or crossing thresholds of the unconscious. It also suggests the ability of survival, of being able to find 'a way out', of reaching a place where you are able to unlock or solve an obstacle that was complex or troubling, such as a Sphinx's riddle.  

IMPORTANT:

Please visit our POLICY PAGE to make an educated and informed purchase HERE

Some of the beads used in this strand are limited. We can not anticipate whether or not this particular style will be available again after this release. 

*Length note: Because individual bead measurements vary slightly, total strand lengths are approximate within a few millimeters in either direction. Please reach out via email if you have any questions about this. 

Please email: info@bloodmilkjewels.com with any questions and we will get back to you in kind and timely manner.