For Kate Taylor and Joan LeLacheur, wampum is a living thing. It’s not just an inanimate discarded clamshell, but rather something that has the ability to tell a story of the past, present and future.

For nearly 30 years the two wampum artists have been working on a wampum belt. Finally finished, with 763 handmade beads, the belt has its fair share of stories.

“The belt was conceived to be for the people of Gay Head to represent the sustainability of the life, the resilience, and the perpetual existence, the past and present,” Ms. Taylor said this week at the old Aquinnah town hall. “We wanted to make a belt that would honor our town and the continuity of life in it.”

Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur will present the belt to the selectmen at a ceremony on Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Aquinnah Cliffs. The selectmen will be the stewards of the belt and it will be on display at the town hall.

The ceremony precedes a wampum jewelry show of their art, as well as the works of Donald Widdiss and Berta Welch. The show is called Wampum Live/New Traditions, and that’s precisely what Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur had in mind for the belt.

“We were figuring out what was the best setting and the best time. Sometimes these things have their own timing and certain elements all come together at once to make it feel right,” Ms. Taylor said. “Wampum has a deep tradition but it’s also alive today and it’s used today and new traditions are being made as we speak. It has a life. We just are thrilled to be a small part of the history of it, the history of the life of wampum.”

What began as a project on graph paper between Ms. LeLacheur, Ms. Taylor and Ms. Taylor’s late husband, Charles Witham, has turned into a two-foot-long, intricately woven belt made of purple and white wampum beads. The three symbols (a circle, a circle with four smaller circles and a triangle) on the belt represent different messages, but Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur wanted to save what the messages mean until Saturday’s ceremony.

All of the beads are made from quahaug shells found by Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur in Menemsha Pond.

“It has to be the perfect shell,” Ms. Taylor said.

“I don’t like to say [Menemsha Pond] has the perfect shells, because we have lots of good, friendly shells from Edgartown, other happy clams from Edgartown, but we love Menemsha Pond shells,” she added shyly, as though she had been keeping the secret close to her heart for years.

Color, size, thickness and age are determining factors for a good shell bead. The older the clam the better, Ms. Taylor said.

“They’d sit around for years on the floor of the pond, for decades, sitting in one place, the ultimate kind of meditative state,” Ms. Taylor said. “The quahaug is also a perfect food. It tastes good; the saltwater is what runs through our veins. There’s something that connects us to everybody else that came before.

“It feels great too. When [the belt] is not in its frame, it’s like holding a little baby,” she added. “It’s got good weight to it. One thing that’s so appealing about the shells and the beads is the weight of them and how warm they feel.”

The bead, Ms. Taylor said, is the ultimate incarnation of the quahaug shell. She and Ms. LeLacheur have been making wampum beads since 1971. After seeing beads in a museum, they decided they had to have their own.

They learned it the hard way — by trial and error.

“We were the only ones who were making them for about 20 years, and then people cracked the case. Because we figured it out ourselves, it was like a trade secret we didn’t feel like we needed to share,” Ms. Taylor said. “If anybody had that much of an interest in knowing how to make the beads, we thought they should really do what we had to do, which was figure it out.”

Wampum was originally used as a form of communication, Ms. Taylor said. American Indians weaved messages into belt strands, just as Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur have. An invitation to a powwow was accepted if you accepted the wampum strand.

Without metal needles beads were originally rough around the edges. Ms. LeLacheur said it takes seven steps now: finding the shell, cutting, first grind, drilling, second grind, polishing and stringing.

“I don’t think I ever break a bead now, do you?” Ms. LeLacheur asked Ms. Taylor. She nodded yes.

“The heartbreak of a broken bead,” Ms. Taylor, said shaking her head.

The belt has been done for several years but Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLacheur were waiting for the perfect time to present it to the town.

“I thought what was maybe holding me back was thinking, well, maybe it’s not done, maybe there’s more,” Ms. Taylor said. “But it stayed like it was for so long, and then I thought maybe we should just allow ourselves to feel that it’s done.”

Both Ms. Taylor and Ms. LeLachuer hope the people of Aquinnah never forget the beauty of their town and what they can accomplish together.

“Its time has come, we’re giving it to the hands of the town and the people. We’ve made it from the beauty of this place,” said Ms. LeLacheur.

“We hope that the fact that people have been living here for thousands of yearswill continue,” Ms. Taylor said. “People will be able to communicate [through the belt] and be able to come together and work as a community. Our hope is it will make people feel good and be proud of their town and each other.”

Wampum Live/New Traditions is from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Howwasswee Trading Post at the Aquinnah Cliffs. The belt presentation ceremony begins at 5 p.m. at the overlook.