Macrame Jade Bracelet in Beige, Tubes and Tiger Eye
50,90 €
Macrame jade bracelet on a beige cord: three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, and a tight braiding that holds the whole together.
No size to choose. The knot slides, you pull to tighten and spread to open: it passes the hand with nothing to handle, and is taken up now and then like a shoelace.
Only the tubes are jade. Tiger’s eye is a quartz, it does not belong to that family, and the treatment status of the green stone stays undetermined. Why I write it down.
A macrame jade bracelet on a beige cord: three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, and a tight braiding that holds the whole together. It has neither clasp nor size: the two strands slide one inside the other and the bracelet tightens in one movement, on any wrist.
In four lines
Beige macrame braiding, adjustable by a sliding knot: no size to choose.
Three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, on a mixed stringing.
Tiger’s eye is a quartz, not jade, and the page says so.
Comes off by sliding it, without undoing anything.
Macrame, and why it changes everything in use
Macrame is not a decoration, it is a mechanism. Two strands cross in flat knots tightened around the carrying strands, and the block of knots slides without coming undone. You pull to tighten, you spread to open, and the bracelet passes the hand with nothing to handle.
What that removes is all the rest: no size to measure, no clasp to close one handed, no elastic that slackens after a year. What it imposes is a habit: the knot loosens on its own with movement, and it has to be taken up now and then, like a shoelace.
The beige cord is the most discreet of the three colours of this stringing. It also gets dirty: it is braided thread, not metal, and it is cleaned in lukewarm water without soap, then dried flat.
Two stones, and only one is called jade
The three green tubes are announced as jade. The two golden brown beads are tiger’s eye, a fibrous quartz whose parallel fibres produce the moving reflection called chatoyancy. It is a fine stone, it has nothing to do with jade, and I am not going to let the whole pass for a bracelet entirely of jade.
On the tubes, the thing to do is the one for any row of drilled stone: look at the drill hole. On a dyed stone the colourant concentrates there and the rim is darker than the rest. The colour also follows the micro cracks, in a network, instead of spreading through the mass. The checks that need no equipment.
The tubes are not rigorously the same green from one example to the next, and that is rather a good sign: a perfectly reproducible colour is what a dye produces, not a rock.
Why I write macrame jade bracelet
Because it is the braiding that makes the piece, ahead of the stone: it is what decides the adjustment, the look and the price. The section carries two other cords of the same stringing, one black and one green, and that is the only choice to make.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to jade and to the knot
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blending it into the rest of the page. Nothing here is demonstrated. These are customs and beliefs, which I report because they are part of the history of this stone. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
The knot that does not come undoneThe braided knot is one of the oldest motifs in Chinese jewellery, and the idea attached to it is lasting attachment rather than protection. Modern macrame does not descend from it directly, but it takes up the same reading. What tradition puts into a jade bracelet.
A stone of moral virtueIn Confucian thought, jade is associated with qualities of character rather than effects on the body: uprightness, constancy, restraint. It is the best documented meaning of them all.
Tiger's eye, another storyThe brown stone of this bracelet comes from a quite different tradition from jade, and what is attributed to it is above all a role of a gaze turned outward. I mention it so as not to let it be thought that the two stones tell the same story.
The jade you patinate by handA piece worn every day ends by taking a polish the workshop does not give. Tradition sees in it an exchange between the stone and its wearer; it is mostly friction, and it is quite real.
Dispatch within 48 hours of your order being confirmed, for delivery within 14 days from dispatch. I keep no stock in reserve, and I will not promise a date I could not meet.
Shipping Costs
€6.99 whatever the destination, free on orders over €47 to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The exact amount is shown in your basket before you pay.
The Packaging, and Why It Matters
Every piece travels in its own pouch, kept apart from the others. This is not a question of presentation: the hardness of jade is unremarkable, between 6 and 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and the quartz in ordinary household dust sits at 7. Two pieces of jewellery that travel together arrive marked.
Fourteen Days to Change Your Mind
No need to give a reason. An email is enough to open a return; there is no form to fill in. Return postage is at your expense, unless the piece does not match its listing or arrives damaged.
Getting the size wrong is the most common reason for a return in this category, and jade cannot be resized the way a solid metal band can. Two minutes spent measuring almost always avoids it. The size guide.
Lukewarm water, mild soap, a soft cloth. A very soft brush for the hollows of a carving. That is all, and it is enough.
What You Must Never Do, and Why
No ultrasonic cleaners, no steam, no solvents, no heat source. This is not a precaution for show: the treatment status of my pieces is undetermined. My supplier does not know it, and weighing identifies the mineral without telling me anything about a possible resin impregnation. Resin withstands neither heat nor solvents, so every piece is handled as though it might contain some. The information sheet on treatments.
Scratches, and Where They Come From
Jade is tough, meaning very difficult to break: its structure of interlocking crystals resists cracking, and that is what made it usable for axe heads in the Neolithic. Its hardness, by contrast, is unremarkable, 6 to 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite. The quartz in ordinary household dust sits at 7: that is what dulls a jade, not knocks. The difference between the two.
Day to Day
Put the piece on after perfume and cream, never before. Take it off for housework, gardening and sport, where knocks against hard edges are common. Store each piece on its own, in its pouch. On a strand of beads, the thread wears out before the stone: it gets restrung, and there is nothing abnormal about that.
My name is Jade. French, from Morbihan, living in Tallinn. I choose the pieces and have them mounted: I mine nothing, I cut nothing, and the metalwork is not done by my hand. What I bring is the selection, and with this material that is what decides everything.
I am not a gemmologist, not a lapidary, not a therapist, and I do not claim to be.
I Weigh, I Do Not Certify
Before a listing goes online, I order one example of it for myself. When it reaches me unmounted, I weigh it in air, then suspended from a thread in a glass of water: the ratio of the two masses gives the density, and that figure separates jadeite, nephrite, serpentine and dyed quartzite without ambiguity.
One example per listing, and not every piece. I do not handle the piece that is sent to you, and I would rather write that down than let you believe otherwise. The method, with its three limits.
What I Cannot Know
The treatment status of my pieces. My supplier does not know it, and the scales do not tell me: they identify the mineral, not the resin impregnation. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I do not have that done. So you will never read “Grade A jadeite”, “Type A” or “untreated” on this site. The information sheet.
Where My Jade Comes From
No Burmese jadeite, and the first reason is legal. Not the one you read everywhere: the JADE Act of 2008 did ban these stones in the United States, but that ban was lifted on 7 October 2016. What applies today dates from 8 April 2021: the US Treasury sanctioned Myanma Gems Enterprise, the state company that controls the Burmese gem trade. So there is no blanket ban, but a US person is not allowed to trade with that entity, and a stone never tells you where it has been. A single supply chain serves ten markets, so it has to hold up in the most demanding of them. When an origin is not confirmed to me in writing, the listing does not state it. My origin charter.
