Creating the Tourmaline Collar

Most often Beth’s projects start with choosing a weaving pattern, “because I love the tiny stones,” she says. She starts by making 5 to 10 sample beaded swatches in a variety of stone, stitch, and thread combinations “until I get the combination I want.”

As an example, Beth “fell in love with” a group of unusual tourmaline slices that transitioned from pale red to caramel and then to deep green/blue.

As a first step the stones were recut and set into gold bezels to stabilize them and highlight their colors.

The next step was to figure out how she would put them together. “It took me a long time to decide how to handle it.” At first, she says, “I thought I would just use gold beads or yellow sapphires between them. Then I walked into a bead store in New York City and the woman who worked there said ‘Look at these tourmaline beads.’” They were a perfect match for the colors in the tourmaline slices. And Farber’s design idea changed.

She first thought of weaving the small tourmaline beads into blocks of individual colors that matched one of the colors in the slices. But instead, she hit on the idea of weaving the beads in such a way that the swatches of beading would imitate the color-zoning of the tourmaline slices. “I got very excited,” she says. “It’s not something I would have thought of without the slices of tourmalines.”

She had beaded all the swatches and edged each one with rows of small flat-sided beads when she realized she wasn’t one hundred percent happy with that decision. So on the last swatch, she tried edging the panel with long tubular beads. That felt right, as it echoed the smooth, gold bezels around the tourmaline slices. It did mean, however, that Farber had to unstitch all the previously beaded panels and re-work them.

Farber then made one final change. She had originally connected the beaded panels at their outer edges with a strand of beads, which she opted to remove so the panels would move more naturally.

By using large gemstones as the focal point in many of her pieces, and by closely weaving gold beads to resemble granulation or fabricated metal- work, Farber’s work more closely resembles hand- made metal work jewelry.