Smooth onyx beads in the shape of rosary beads, paired with sterling silver hollow 'pearls' gives this strand the appearance of a 'modern rosary', reminding me the rosary beads of my childhood. Prayer and ritual all feel like very solitary practices to me; attempts at connecting, or the feeling of connecting to the numinous, the divine, the otherworldly that swarms around us unseen. The night feels most appropriate for these moments of devotion;  I have memories of learning to pray before bed, before sleep as I had one Catholic family member, a grandmother who was extremely devout and believed in the more supernatural aspects of Catholicism. As a young kid, she would take me on pilgrimages to where the Virgin Mary had appeared in clouds over a corn field, or where a statue was known to have 'cried'. My childhood was marked by these strange trips, and I always associated rosary beads and praying with them as ritualistic and 'spell' like. 

The initial Night Rosary was created in honor of the Winter Solstice ~ and now, at the time of my writing this, we have crossed the Spring Equinox. I find the transitions of seasons to always be solitary times, the night time season, when it is colder here in the part of the world where I live and where these jewels are crafted by hand. They are designed to be worn in companionship for your own solitary times, both by choice or by circumstance, to soothe grief or to aid you in your devotion and ritual practices.  

Onyx:

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

These beads are hand cut and therefore may have very slight differences in size and may have small signs of the carver's hands along the edges. These are not fabricated by a machine, they are made by hand and therefore aren't uniformly perfect. The photographs accurately portray the quality of the stones and the cuts. 

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 is comprised of smooth round onyx barrels with small faceted onyx and sterling silver beads and measures approximately 46.5 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. 

This strand is handmade to order, just for you. Please allow approximately 6 weeks for creation before shipping.

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