Antique SVC Venetian Opaque Orchid #2 Seed Beads 10/0

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

Take the colour name loosely before you order. Orchid in the SVC vocabulary is a soft, greyed mauve rather than a saturated purple. The body colour sits between lilac and dusty rose with enough ash in it that a filled area reads as muted heather, not clean violet. Beside a modern amethyst it will look quiet and slightly dulled — correct for period work, and wrong if your reference piece wants a bright purple. Judge it against your reference in daylight; under warm household light the pink in it comes forward.

Opaque, and glossy opaque specifically. No light passes through these — the colour stops at the surface, and that surface carries a period gloss that puts a small hard highlight on each bead. This matters more than it sounds. A glossy opaque and a matte or frosted opaque at the same hue read as two different materials once they sit together in a filled field, so substituting across finish categories will show in the finished piece even when the hue agrees exactly.

Lot character. Mauves of this age carry hue drift across the lot — some beads lean pinker, others cooler and greyer — and that spread is part of why an antique field looks alive rather than printed. Dark specks in the perforations are normal for this stock, kiln and annealing debris from period production rather than anything introduced since. Uncirculated warehouse stock of this age also carries the occasional off-colour bead, so order enough to sort from if you need a clean single-colour field, and plan on a pre-sort for count-critical or uniform-face work.

Sizing and threading. SVC 10/0 runs 2.40–2.70mm with a hole in the 0.70–0.80mm range, roughly 13–15 beads to a strung inch, and strung counts for antique lots are estimates. A size 10–12 needle with 0.10–0.18mm thread suits it: KO, One-G or Nymo B/D. Antique holes are undocumented and vary lot to lot, and adjacent SVC sizes overlap widely, so caliper measurement beats the card notation and a test-thread beats both.

For restoration this is the mauve that turns up in antique beadwork where the purple has settled into something softer and greyer than anything currently produced, which makes it useful for infills and repairs where a modern violet would announce itself immediately. Browse our full SVC purples inventory to compare against your reference material.

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