Transcript
Hi. I’m Tam, and now I’m going to demo stringing and knotting with a silk string. Usually, this is what we use for pearls. You put all your pearls onto the string, and what you’re going to need for this is very, very, very pointy tweezers.
Basically, my first knot is like so, so I made a regular knot. I’m going to take the tip, just one tip, of my tweezer, and I gently, because if you do it too quickly you’ll get a knot, and it’s really difficult to unravel it.
The first thing that I try to do is move the knot as close to the pearl as possible, because that’s the whole goal of this. You want to have knots so that the pearls don’t move at all, so they don’t bang against each other and damage the pearls.
You want to move it as close to the pearl as possible, then you’re going to slide it to the tip, where it’s graduated so that it doesn’t become smaller and smaller. And every time I slide, pull. Slide, gently pull. Slide, gently pull, and my knot is pretty close to the pearl. Then I take my tweezers, and I grip it not at the tip, because that will cut the cord. You’re going to grip it like about here. And basically you’re gripping it tight, and then at the same time as you are pushing the knot towards the pearl, you’re pulling in the opposite direction on the silk string.
There you go. So that you have your knot. Then you’re going to move the next one up, and then repeat the process. You’re going to make a knot. This is just a movement that you’re going to have to figure out your sort of process with it, but the goal is to move the knot as close to the pearl as possible, and then try to make the knot as small as possible before you take the tweezer out.
Basically, it’s move the knot down, the tweezer, and then I pull. And move the knot down, I pull. And then I think that’s pretty tight, so I’m going to pull out my tweezer. And I check it first, because you can still try to move it down a little bit. But you want to do everything gently here, because otherwise the knot will tighten and then it’s really hard to undo it. You may want to practice this process first with a thicker string because it’s much easier to knot and to undo the knot with a thicker string, before you go right into a very, very thin silk.
Now I’m going to grip, and I’m going to pull. I’m going to move again in an opposite direction. I push the knot towards the bead, and then I pull on this end in the opposite direction.
And that’s how we string pearls, and knotting pearls.
