Antique SVC Venetian Metallic Red Violet #1 Seed Beads 10/0

Metallic Red Violet #1 — Antique SVC Venetian Seed Beads, 10/0

The honest thing first: this is a surface coating on glass, and it has aged. Across this stock you will find beads where the metallic layer has thinned or rubbed at the shoulders and hole rims, showing bright silvery-white flashes through the magenta. If you need a uniform galvanized finish, this is not it — and no antique metallic will be, because the coating is the first thing a century of handling touches.

What you get instead is a mottled, hammered-metal texture across a finished piece that modern uniform plating cannot imitate. The colour is a galvanized red-violet: fuchsia pulled toward purple, with real metal sheen rather than a printed-on shine. Some beads sit bright and near-mirror, others darker and more oxidised, some with a faint warm bronze cast where the layer has gone thin. In quantity that variation reads as depth.

Care matters more here than on any other finish in this collection. Metallic surfaces are less durable than the glass beneath them. Friction, skin oils, abrasives and household chemicals will dull or strip the coating over time. Wipe clean only, avoid ultrasonic cleaning entirely, and think about placement — a bead at a high-contact point on a worn piece will lose its finish before one carried in a pictorial field.

Matching. For restoration this colourway fills a niche that is genuinely hard to substitute: it sits naturally beside antique cut-steel and metal-bead work, delivering the visual weight of metal at glass-bead scale. A modern galvanized purple of the same hue reads flat and new next to original material.

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. A size 10–12 needle with 0.10–0.18mm thread suits it. Antique holes are undocumented and vary lot to lot — test-thread a sample first.

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