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Pale blue, and the Annunciation

Blue is not one of the four colours of the Roman calendar — that is white, green, violet and red — but it has belonged to Our Lady in the popular imagination for so long that it may as well be. In Portugal and Spain the privilege is more than sentiment: certain Marian feasts have carried a licence for blue for centuries. A blue piece is understood immediately by anybody who grew up with this, and it needs no explaining at all.

This particular blue is soft and clouded rather than bright, the colour of the sky over Contenças in the hour before the heat arrives, when there is still some haze in it. It is a colour that reads as early rather than as decorative. Against it, the warm-toned figure at the centre and the two darker notes low in the run are the only strong marks on the whole piece, and they are placed where a thumb finds them.

The single piece in this group is named for the Annunciation — the moment a girl alone in a room is asked something and answers out loud. That is the scene the whole rest of it depends on, and it is a quiet scene rather than a triumphant one, which is the right register for this colour. The beads are larger than most in the collection and the links between them are turned wider to match, so the run sits heavier and moves more slowly through the fingers than its pallor suggests. It is not a fast piece to tell, and it was not meant to be.

Choose blue if you want something Marian that is not obvious about it. A white piece with a blue figure announces itself; this one waits to be noticed. It is also the easiest of the light-coloured pieces to live with day to day, because a clouded blue does not show handling the way an almost-white run does.

Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire link and closed by hand, meticulously, link by link.