137 ovals on their sides: the life of an east-west tennis necklace

Before there is any gold, there is a drawing. On the screen the necklace is a line of 137 ovals, every one of them 3.00 × 2.00 mm, and beside it a column of figures the design program works out for itself: 6.20 ct in all, about 0.05 ct a stone.

A carat is 200 milligrams, so the 137 stones together weigh 1,240 milligrams, spread along the whole length of the necklace. Where the metric carat came from is told in the life of our eternity band.

Small as they are, they are held to the same grade as a centre stone. Every laboratory-grown diamond we set is E to F colour and VVS to VS clarity, from a centre stone to the smallest stone in a line, and that includes all 137 here.

An oval has a long way and a short way. On a ring, GIA’s guide to the oval cut describes an east-west oval as one set horizontally across the finger, rather than pointing along it. Our necklace gives every oval the same quarter turn, so each one’s length lies along the line and the stones follow one another tip to tip.

That is what the front of the necklace shows: an unbroken line of ovals, each wider than it is tall as you face it, running from one side to the other.

The shape is older than its modern cut. GIA notes that ovals were among the shapes cut once the brilliant style appeared, around 1700, but that books on gems began to name the oval as a shape only in the late 1800s. It dates the modern oval brilliant to 1957, when the cutter Lazare Kaplan developed a design of 58 facets with the sparkle of a round brilliant. How the oval sits beside the emerald cut, the pear and the radiant is in our guide to stone shapes.

Look closely at the front and you can see how the line holds together. Each oval sits inside a thin rim of metal, and wherever two meet, a pair of small round-headed claws stands at the join, one above the line and one below it, between one oval and the next.

Seen from the side, every stone has a frame of its own, joined to the next where the claws stand. That is what makes it a tennis necklace rather than a solid collar: with a link for every stone, the line can bend at every join. The renders show it both ways, following a curve at the front and laid flat in a circle.

The word “tennis” has a story of its own, which comes later in Stories in Stone.

Turn the necklace on its edge and the frame under each oval shows. Below the rim, two flat rails run along the line with an open window between them, and the claws rise from a cross-bar at every join. Under each stone there is no closed cup of metal, only that window.

Jewellers call an open frame like this a basket. Ganoksin’s lesson on making one describes the basket as an open-wire design that uses very little metal and lets light enter the stone from all angles. How it compares with other ways of holding a stone is in settings explained.

Laid down, the necklace closes into a circle of 137 ovals, with no larger stone at the centre and no plain chain at the back: the same stone, in the same basket, all the way round to the small clasp that closes it.

That is also why a different length is a different necklace: with one stone to every link, a longer or shorter line means more or fewer links, and so more or fewer stones. Other lengths are made on request and quoted separately.

The drawing weighs the metal too. It measures the volume of every rim, rail and claw once, and the weight in each metal follows from that volume and the metal’s density. So the same necklace is 15.42 g in 9K gold, 15.94 g in 10K, 17.93 g in 14K and 21.45 g in 18K, and 14.42 g in silver. The shape is the same in every metal; only the weight changes.

What the karats mean is in our guide to gold karats. The rest happens in our workshop in Surat, where the design is drawn, the metal is cast and the stones are set.

Every piece is checked at setting, at finishing and again before it is packed. When the necklace is finished, we photograph it and send you the photograph before it ships: your own necklace, not the render on this page.

You can also choose moissanite for the same design. It is a different stone, not a diamond, and it doesn’t come with an IGI report. Neither does the laboratory-grown version of this necklace: an IGI report comes with a laboratory-grown main stone above 1 carat, and each of these ovals is about 0.05 ct.