Antique SVC Venetian Opaque Luster Forest Green #1 Seed Beads 10/0

Opaque Luster Forest Green #1 — Antique SVC Venetian Seed Beads, 10/0

The name promises more depth than the glass delivers. This is a mid-tone pine green with a grey-sage undertone, not the near-black forest green the label suggests. In mass it reads as a settled, slightly dusty green that holds its value at arm's length rather than collapsing toward black the way a very dark opaque does. Worth knowing first, because a buyer matching a deep bottle green from a period piece is looking at the wrong tube.

Why the finish decides the match. The body is opaque — no light transmission at all — and the luster is a thin pearlescent coating laid over it, reading here as a low pearly gloss rather than an obvious rainbow. Against a frosted or plain opaque green at the identical hue this looks wetter and catches highlights along the shoulder of each bead, and the perforations read darker where the coating did not carry into the cut. Substituting across finish categories is the mistake that shows up in the finished piece, not on the sample card.

Lot character. Tonal spread is real in this stock: some beads sit cooler and greyer, others warmer and closer to true pine, and an aged coating adds its own faint cast on top of that. Dark specks in the perforations are normal here — kiln and annealing debris from period production. Uncirculated warehouse stock of this age carries the occasional off-colour bead, so order enough to sort from if you need a clean single-colour field, and 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 — KO, One-G, Nymo B or D — is the right pairing. Antique holes are undocumented and vary lot to lot, and adjacent SVC sizes overlap widely, which is why caliper measurement beats the card notation. Test-thread a sample before anything count-critical.

A green like this does structural work in period beadwork — foliage, borders, the ground that the brighter colours sit against — and the low luster keeps a large filled area from going dead under artificial light. We do not expect to source this colorway again. Browse our full SVC greens inventory to compare against your reference material.

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