Deidry is one lucky designer who has managed to collect vintage beads from her friends. What she has done is to incorporate them into new designs, mixing with modern components.

Her two lovely bracelets here can be worn individually or together. The gorgeous green beads are antique and they go well with the silver metal beads and clasps and brownish triangular mother of pearl beads.The old beads have so much character to them. Deidry did a great job and enhancing their green with the other beads.

Robin is a bead artist who adores green beads. She is the author of a blog appropriately called Beadlust. In her beautiful blog post entitled "Glorious,glorious Green Glass Beads" , she tells of her past visits to the Czech Republic on bead buying missions. There she met a man whose family's glass bead business, like so many others, was closed down by the Communist government in the 1940's - too capitalist. The Czech government came to their senses a decade later and restarted glass bead making when the country needed money. The bead making was consolidated and with less competition, there was no need to offer so many colours.

Fortunately, many families managed to hide some of the beads during this purge. Robin's post shows a number of pictures of the amazing range of green colours in old sample cards and seed beads dating from the late 1880's to WWII. In the past, family businesses competed with each other so they developed secret recipes to get the different shades. Today, the colour choices are improving from various manufacturers in Japan, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Beader Design #:254
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The Beading Gem's Journal
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