The Color of New Grass ※Reserved

Natural-color Japanese Akoya pearl necklace, 52 cm.

The pearls range from 7.0–7.9 mm and are arranged in a gentle graduation from the center outward. Hand-knotted on light mint green polyester thread using the all-knot technique and finished with a Sterling Silver clip clasp.

This necklace is strung with a light mint green thread using the all-knot technique.

The pearls are Akoya pearls. They were first sorted through sieves into three size groups: 7.75–7.99 mm, 7.35–7.74 mm, and 7.00–7.34 mm, then arranged to create a gentle graduation.

These are also No-Toned Akoya pearls. Toned pearls tend to have a pinkish appearance, while No-Toned pearls are generally whiter. Whether a pearl is Toned or No-Toned has nothing to do with quality. It is simply a matter of preference. Some people prefer one, while others prefer the other.

For this necklace, I chose a light mint green thread. It is subtle and does not distract from the pearls, yet it gives the necklace a very charming appearance.

This thread is lovely, but it has quite a difficult personality.

Last night, after two hours of struggle, my all-knotting attempt ended in failure. The thread became hopelessly tangled. It kept twisting and twisting, eventually causing the entire project to fail. This time I worked very carefully, but whenever I let my guard down, the thread immediately began twisting again. It was a difficult battle.

As a result, I finished this necklace more carefully and meticulously than any necklace I have made before.

I know, I know. The thread does not actually have a bad personality. The problem lies with the person handling it.

I am seriously considering attending a sewing class so that I can learn to understand the heart of thread. After all, when skilled people work with it, the thread never seems to get tangled.

This time, the story is unusually short. Compared to the number of photographs, I seem to have run out of words. So I will add just a little more.

The pearls in this necklace were selected from a lot of approximately 460 half-drilled No-Toned Akoya pearls. Originally, there were enough pearls for about ten necklaces, and they had already been sorted into ten separate packs.

However, the customer requested pearls that were as close to 8 mm as possible. To meet that request, I combined all ten packs and searched through the entire collection to find the largest pearls available.

In the end, there were fewer large pearls than I had expected. Pearls close to 8 mm accounted for only about one-third of the necklace. That is why I arranged them in a gentle graduation. Coincidentally, a graduated design was also the customer’s second request.

These pearls come from the pearl farm in Tsushima owned by the pearl company where I once worked. A wholesale customer of mine purchased part of the harvest, and I later bought some of those pearls from them.

Perhaps it is because I know their history so well, but familiar pearls always seem like good pearls to me.

Before settling on this light mint green thread, I made sample versions of this necklace using five different thread colors at the request of a customer. I wanted to show how each color would change the overall impression of the necklace.

The customer initially told me that mint green would not suit her. However, once she saw the actual samples, it became clear that we had been imagining different colors.

I had been calling this thread “mint green,” but it turned out that it was not really mint green at all—it was a much lighter mint green. In other words, there was a small misunderstanding between us. More accurately, I simply did not know the proper name of the color.

Even so, creating these color samples was a great deal of fun. It was fascinating to see how dramatically the character of the necklace changed depending on the color of the thread, even though the pearls themselves remained exactly the same.

For those interested, there is also a video showing the entire creation process of this necklace from the very beginning.

In the video, I first sort the pearls using sieves, separating those closest to 8 mm, those around 7.5 mm, and the smaller pearls. From there, the process continues with arranging the pearls, drilling, and other preparation work.

Toward the end of the video, you can also see me creating sample necklaces using five different thread colors to compare how each color changes the overall character of the necklace.

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