30x13mm Glass Tube (5) - Vintage Replica Trade Beads

Measurements:  30mm long by 13mm wide with a 62.5mm threading hole

Quantity per pack:  5

Knot them onto a funky necklace, use as a centre piece on a choker, decorate home wares, anything really.  They are heavy so definitely not good for earrings!

Tiny little shapes (all different) have been pressed into the opaque black glass base.  It looks like flowers, stars & birds in the patterning, possibly even a few faces.  Every single bead is individual.

Colours:  Black with blue, red, orange, brown, green, yellow, white and every now and then a bit of transparent glass in colours also. 

They were decorated with slices of decorative glass canes pressed onto the outside, then rolled in a mould whilst still hot.  You can see some whorls from the rolling procedure on some of them.

Often called Venetian Trade Beads, they were made as trading beads to the Americas and Africa.

Origin:  Hand Made in India - We believe this bead to be a reproduction of a Trade Bead.

Bead Shack made a huge bead haul around 2007, and these beads were quite old before that.  The man we purchased them from used to collect large hauls of beads that became available, so who knows how long ago they were made!  Our best guess would be around 1980s.