I created this necklace and earring set with opaque hand faceted Copen Blue Glass and Hudson’s Bay White Heart trade beads.

The 20 in. necklace consists of Opaque Russian, Hudson’s Bay White Heart and Black Czech trade beads and has matching earrings. All Sterling Silver clasp and ear wires strung on German silk. The center trade bead is approximately 10mm and the others graduate down from that size. You can see on the earring trade beads that the core of the Copen Blues have a milky blue glass with an outer layer of opaque Copen Blue glass.

The opaque blue trade beads, made as early as the 1500′s in North Bohemia are called Copen Blues. They are the forerunners of the cobalt Blue Russians. Trade beads of this type came from Gablonz, Bohemia which was the leading bead making area north of the Alps. The beads are all hand faceted. This style of bead is one of the first beads made from canes of glass and may have inspired the Muranese glass makers as early as the 1500′s. The Arabs and the Africans loved them and trading was heavy. The opaque beads are some of the earliest types found from burial collections from the late 1700′s and 1800′s in Southwest California and Arizona.

The red trade beads with the white centers are called Hudson’s Bay White Hearts because they were the primary bead traded across southern Canada and north America by the Hudson’s Bay Fur Trading Company. White hearts refer to a style of bead with a white interior, also known as Cornaline d’Aleppo.  A rose-red outer layer was made in imitation of the popular red agate, Carnelian (French word is cornaline). Possibly first made in Aleppo, Syria, a well known trade center where carnelian was traded.  In the 17 and 1800′s these beads were most desirable to natives in North America. Originally they were individually made by winding green, yellow or white glass on a rod and then covering it with red glass.  The original red glass was colored by adding gold chloride and covering another layer of glass with the red extended the gold glass, kept the price down and made them more lucrative as a trade item.

I added the Black Czech beads here in this necklace just because I like them. They aren’t old but they’re still the traditional style of black glass bead made in Murano since the 1500′s!