Made in Venice, Italy early 1900s for the African trade
The beads we now call chevrons have also been known as star, or rosetta, beads. You see the star when you look at the end, or cross section. Most are 12 pointed.
Chevrons are drawn beads, created by enclosing an air bubble inside a gather of molten glass. This becomes the bead's hole when the glass is drawn into a tube.
To create the star pattern, the initial gather is pressed into a corrugated mold, then dipped in another color, pressed into the mold again, and into the next color.The process is repeated until the desired number of layers is reached.
The gather is then stretched into a long tube, cooled, cut into sections, and made into beads. For large beads, the ends are ground to expose the chevron pattern. Small ones are “hot-tumbled” to melt the ends forming the familiar egg shape.
The Venetians first discovered these processes in the 15th century and started selling beads to the world explorers of that era. Spanish conquistadors brought tiny 7- layer faceted chevrons to the New World. I collected a few in Peru in the early 1980s and am now offering one small strand(GLA-). The innermost layer of early 7-layer chevrons is a translucent blue-green tint sometimes hard to see.
Chevron making remained a closely guarded secret until some Venetian glassmakers were lured to the Netherlands, where a second chevron making center grew up during the 17th century, lasting into the mid- 18th century. This industry supplied Dutch spice traders who carried chevrons to Indonesia and other former Dutch colonies in Asia and the Caribbean.
Known as the “aristocrat of beads” in Africa, where most chevrons ended up, they were worn mainly by chiefs and other important people. The beads were not only a symbol of wealth and power, but the notion that they possessed potent magical properties, persisted well into the 20th century when I was first buying chevrons in the markets of Abidjan.
Any valuable bead is bound to be imitated, but efforts largely failed until the late 1980s or early 1990s when Indian copies started showing up. They were much less refined in both construction of the canes and grinding and polishing. Before they had a chance to improve, the Chinese took over with better equipment and started producing shockingly good imitations of Venetian chevrons,(which sadly are being widely mis-represented as antique).At the same time American glass bead-makers began studying in Venice and creating gorgeous high quality chevrons in entirely new color combos.
Now in continuous production for over 600 years, the chevron continues to fascinate and impress diverse designers and collectors around the world.
"Java chevrons" are new Indonesian wound beads with a wavy line near each end that's apparently meant to mimic a chevron pattern. They are not chevrons.
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