Antique SVC Venetian Color Lined Clear Violet Red Seed Beads 10/0

Color Lined Clear Violet Red — Antique SVC Venetian Seed Beads, 10/0

Read the care line before you order: the colour here is a lining inside the channel of clear glass, it is not fused into the glass, and bleach, solvents, soaking or ultrasonic cleaning will lift or fade it. That is not a defect of age, it is how colour-lined beads were made. Wipe clean only, keep finished work out of standing water, and a colour-lined piece will hold its saturation indefinitely. Wash it once the wrong way and you are left with clear beads.

What you actually see is a two-layer bead. The body is near-colourless glass, so it stays glassy and light-catching, and the violet-leaning red sits in the core where the lining runs. In mass that reads as a saturated raspberry running through a bright clear shell rather than as a solid block of colour — brighter and cooler than a transparent red of similar hue, and more luminous than any opaque could be. Worth knowing if your reference is a solid violet or a solid red; this sits between the two and behaves like neither.

Lot character. Lining density varies across uncirculated stock of this age. Some beads carry a heavy, fully saturated channel; others run thinner and read paler, closer to a blush against the clear glass. Both are authentic to the lot, and the spread is part of what makes colour-lined beadwork look period rather than printed. For colour-critical work, pre-sort by saturation. Dark specks in the perforations are normal here as well — kiln and annealing debris from period production.

Sizing and threading. SVC 10/0 runs 2.40–2.70mm with holes in the 0.70–0.80mm range, roughly 13–15 beads to a strung inch, a size 10–12 needle and 0.10–0.18mm thread — KO, One-G or Nymo B/D. Antique holes are undocumented and vary lot to lot, and adjacent SVC sizes overlap widely, so caliper the beads and test-thread a sample before count-critical work. Go gently with the needle: the lining sits in the channel and a forced pass can scrape it.

Colour-lined clears are one of the hardest categories to substitute in restoration, because nothing modern reproduces that lit-from-within core over antique glass. We do not expect to source this colorway again. Browse our full SVC purples inventory to compare against your reference material.

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