Step 2

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.”