Bear claw or bear paw are the "campfire" or "mountain man" names for these early, antique Venetian off-white trade beads with scattered red, white and dark blue murrine.
Nice designer/collector set of 3 short barrels, largest 13x15mm
These early beads made in Venice, Italy in the 1800s for the African trade, don't have a core as later millefiori had. The are all off-white except for the widely spaced murrine.
The larger bead in this set shows how unusually thick the cane slices were in these early beads. At first I thought that entire small beads had been pressed into the semi-molten white core. But if that were the case, their centers would be white, not dark blue.
I'm not sure if this is the source of the name, but I recently saw an image of an antique Native American pouch with a beaded design called Bear Claw which looked a lot like the murrine in these beads.
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