The Wood Comes From a Violin Workshop

Every piece of Chandrakalakriti jewellery begins in a workshop that makes parts for musical instruments.

That workshop is in Kolkata, and it has been running since 2003. It cuts Ebony, Boxwood, Padauk, Maple and Rosewood into bass tailpieces, violin tailpieces, fingerboards, acoustic guitar bridges, and the boxwood glueing clamps that instrument makers use at the bench. Those parts are packed into cartons and flown out of Kolkata to Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.

Chandrakalakriti is made from what that work leaves behind.

Why instrument wood is not ordinary wood

A violin fingerboard carries the pressure of four strings for decades without hollowing. A tailpiece anchors that same tension and must not shift with the weather. A guitar bridge holds its saddle slot straight to a tolerance measured in fractions of a millimetre.

Wood that can do this is selected long before anyone cuts it. It has to be dense, straight-grained, properly seasoned, free of voids and knots, and stable enough that a change of season does not change its shape. Most timber never qualifies. What reaches this workshop has already passed that test, because an instrument maker in Bavaria will send it back if it has not.

That is the wood you are wearing.

The offcuts

Cutting a tailpiece from a block leaves a great deal of wood behind. What remains is too small for another fitting and far too good to burn: fully seasoned Ebony, Boxwood and Padauk, in pieces a few centimetres across.

For years they were simply set aside. A pair of earrings happens to be exactly the size of what was left over.

Nothing is grown or felled for Chandrakalakriti. Every piece comes out of wood that was already bought, already dried, and already accounted for by the instrument trade.

The woods

• Ebony — the black wood of fingerboards and tailpieces. Dense enough to sink in water, and it takes a polish like stone. Our darkest pieces are cut from it.
• Boxwood — pale and so close-grained that it holds an engraved line a fraction of a millimetre wide. Used for fittings, and for the instrument maker's own tools.
• Padauk — the deep red. The colour is the wood's own, and it deepens with age. It is never dyed.
• Maple — the wood of the violin's back and sides. Pale, with a quiet figure in the grain.
• Rosewood, Purpleheart and African Coral Wood — used in smaller quantities, as they come through.

What this means for what you wear

Hardness. These woods were chosen to survive decades of mechanical stress. An earring cut from them will not soften, swell or lose its edge.

Colour that is real. On bare-wood pieces, nothing is stained or painted. Black is Ebony. Red is Padauk. Honey is Boxwood, deepened by cutting and polishing.

Weight. A pair weighs about 10 grams. Wood lets a piece be large without being heavy, which is why these can be worn through a full working day or a long evening.

Who makes it

Chandrakalakriti was founded by Chandrika Bhagat, who has worked with these woods for over two decades, since 2003, through the instrument business. She knew the material first and came to jewellery afterwards. That is the opposite of how most jewellery brands begin, and it is the reason these pieces are built the way they are.

What we do not claim

We do not make instruments and we are not luthiers. We make jewellery from the wood of a workshop that supplies them. The designs are our own. The material, and the standard it is held to, come from the bench next door.