Baronial Coronet for Fearghus mac Cailin

October 2021

The spiritual pairing to Cat’s diadem is of course the coronet for Fearghus mac Cailin.

I was glad to be able to produce a coronet that not only fit his personality, but also his head, using techniques of sneakiness and treachery that would I knew he would appreciate.

Inspiration

I used his arms for inspiration of elements to include in this coronet, and also drew inspiration from Brian Boru Millennium Crown, which even though it is a modern presentation, I was drawn to the contrasting metal and overlapping design elements and juxtaposition of asymmetry of the spans of metal components and symmetry of point placement. I chose to try to incorporate similar design ideals into this piece, which lead me to include the most math into a design of any artifact I have even created, but I am supremely happy with the result.

Final

Band of alternating nickel silver and brass. Acid etched knotwork and elements filled with vitreous enamel. Central cabochon is glass representation of speckled jade. “Pearls” are beads of black lava rock.

Process

I am afraid that I did not take many in process photos of this project, but I can try to describe the process.

The design elements were meant to include the aspects of his arms: the sun, the stars, and the hound. I used the suns on the brass point pieces with the stars on the nickel silver coinciding with the Per fess sable and argent, a sun Or and an Irish wolfhound courant sable and in chief two mullets of seven points argent. I also wanted to include some knotwork design elements as well. I used vinyl masking to resist the acid etch, and filled the hounds using vitreous enamel. The tricky part was that I wanted the six points to be symmetrical in their placement on the coronet circle, but wanted the size of the metal plates to be asymmetrical, reminiscent of the inspirational crown. This meant that the points were not going to be placed in the same position from plate to plate and in order to maintain the total symmetry I needed to math, and create several paper mock-ups to ensure the final assembly would work. The end result was that the points would appear perfectly placed, even though the spans of the given metal plates were inconsistent.

All in all it was a successful build and a fun project.