afo-
- A fascinating bead that you have to have in your hands before you can understand really see how it's made...basically short sections of star canes with red on the outside are being laid down as filler around some blue murrini in the center. The ends of the fancy canes with red outside are clearly visible at the ends of the bead and also peek out near the middle - where hints of yellow are in my photo, and other places on the other side.
- After you've looked at about 10,000 or more of these beads your start to imagine what it might be like in the studio where outside-the-box beads like this are created find their way into the world. Not as pretty as some of the others, you probably have to be a bead nerd to like this one, so I priced it a little lower even tho is probably truly one-of-a-kind!
- 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 star 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
- Only one available