For centuries, Indians cherished quahog -grenades, the purple -like hard coverings of cockles found along North -Atlantic coasts, which they formed in beads called Wampum to decorate ceremonial garments and, later, to use as a currency.
Nowadays, however, Quahogs are primarily a food source, often found in Clam Chowders, and their shells are thrown away.
Melanie Georgacopoulos, a jewelry designer who is known for her unconventional use of pearls and shells, had never heard of Quahogs before she started working on her new Katina collection.
“When I saw them, I fell in love with the shells,” said Mrs. Georgacopoulos, who was born in Greece and now works in London and Hamburg, Germany. “In the beginning I felt attracted to the beautiful purple color, but after research I realized that it has an important history and has a human culture.”
She heard about it when Brendan Breen, an entrepreneur in Boston, who had a lifelong fascination for Quahogs, asked if she wanted to buy some shells.
As a teenager in Duxbury, Massachusetts, along the Atlantic, Mr. Breen Quahogs harvested by hand and sold them to local seafood wholesalers. Then, at the university, who studied aquaculture, he patented a method to prepare quahogs to produce cultivated pearls. In 2016, after his graduation, he founded Mercenaria Pearl, a company in Boston that sells a modest number of quahog pearls (they are not easy to cultivate, he said) and his Shell jewelry designs.
A reason why Quahog Shell reasons is not common, Mr Breen said, is that the scale is difficult to manipulate: “Because it is sensitive to warmth and vibrations, and shells often contain natural fractures, it can be a challenge to find an unhealthy piece that can handle transformation without cracking.”
That did not stop that Mrs. Georgacopoulos, who devised unusual ways to work with pearls and shells, such as creating small cubes of Abalone Shell to hang on earrings and hangers, to cut pearls to reveal their inner stripes and retain mother-of-pearl to resemble an emarald-cut gemstone.
Given the history of the shells, Mrs. Georgacopoulos said that she wanted to use them with meaning in designs, and that she was inspired by a chain in silver Byzantine style that belonged to her great -aunt Katina Roussou. “When my great -aunt fled the historic fire of Smyrna in 1922, the chain was one of the few things she took,” said the designer, referring to the city that is now known as Izmir, Turkey. “It was a painful chapter in the history of our family.”
She recreated the complicated chain by weaving loops of Onyx and strands of quahog beads together and versions with white mother loops, freshwater pearls and yellow gold. The Katina collection, which also includes bracelets and earrings, sells for $ 550 to $ 18,500.
Just like Mr. Breen is Mrs. Georgacopoulos fascinated by pearls and their shells. She started working with them while she followed a master’s degree in jewelry at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2010 she founded her namesake Pearl Brand because, she recently said: “I felt that there was nothing interesting in contemporary Pearl designs.”
In 2012, her designs caught the attention of the Japanese Pearl Company Tasaki and started designing the M/G Tasaki collection. “I still discover new ways to use pearls,” she said.
What Mr. Breen concerns, he continued to work on growing quahog pearls and experimenting with the shells. “While you work with a piece of quahog scale, the flat gray, lime -like exterior is removed to reveal a hard, smooth surface with brilliant white and purple stripes,” he said. “Each has its own original character.”
But don’t expect to find a pearl in these shells. Only about one in a million quahog shells produces pearls, he says, and of that are a few gemstone quality.
