Antique SVC Venetian Opaque Luster Red #2 Seed Beads 10/0

Opaque Luster Red #2 — Antique SVC Venetian Seed Beads, 10/0

This one lives or dies on how muted you need the red to be. It is not a clean primary red — it is a dusty, slightly earthen brick red with a warm cast, softer and more clay-toned than a modern opaque red of the same name. Beside a bright fire red it will read muted and a little dull; beside period beadwork it usually reads correct, which is exactly why restoration buyers come looking for it.

The luster is a coating, and the perforations are where you see that. A thin pearlescent layer sits over the opaque red body and lifts a soft sheen off the curve of each bead. It did not reach into the cut, so the perforations read darker and warmer than the outer surface, and a filled area picks up a fine speckled texture from all those warm rings rather than presenting as one flat red. If you are matching a solid opaque, that ring colour is part of what your eye will register.

Lot character. Coating cast varies across stock of this age — some beads carry more sheen than others, and a few read closer to the bare body colour where the luster wore thin in storage. Dark specks in the perforations are normal for this stock, kiln and annealing debris from period production. Uncirculated warehouse stock carries the occasional off-colour bead too, so order enough to sort from if you need a clean single-colour field, and plan on a pre-sort for uniform-face work.

Sizing and threading. SVC 10/0 runs 2.40–2.70mm with a hole in the 0.70–0.80mm range, about 13–15 beads to a strung inch, worked with a size 10–12 needle and 0.10–0.18mm thread such as KO, One-G or Nymo B/D. Antique holes are undocumented and vary lot to lot, and adjacent SVC sizes overlap widely enough that a caliper tells you more than the card notation does — test-thread a sample before anything count-critical.

Substituting a glossy opaque or a bare matte for a lustered one changes how the whole field handles light, so for repair work on lustered period pieces this is the category to stay inside. We do not expect to source this colorway again. Browse our full SVC reds inventory to compare against your reference material.

Uncirculated old stock, never strung for trade. Small lot, finite old stock.