Featuring enduring pattern of blue, white and amber murrini, this set shows the bundled cane version at the top and the cased cane version at the bottom.
This demonstrates that this design remained popular for many decades and continued to be produces and techniques evolved. The older bead has chips at both ends.
Trade beads almost always have holes big enough for 2mm leather cords
Millefiori, the Italian name for these colorful beads, means 1000 flowers
The beads are decorated with slices of glass canes created either bundling very thin glass tubes together to form the pattern, then fusing them, or encasing round or staar pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface and the semi-molten glass cores of the beads are rolled over them, picking up the slices.
Made in Venice, Italy for the African trade mid-1800s to early 1900s
From the collection of Joyce Diamanti, bead researcher, writer and educator
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