Reds! Vaselines and Venetians – Trade Bead Necklace and Earrings

This necklace is 20 inches long with a Sterling Silver designer clasp – JW !  The Earring wires are also Sterling.

I’ve always enjoyed this necklace because it’s red…oh, and it has a lot of interesting trade beads! When I first was getting bit by the trade bead bug I’d heard the term Vaseline Beads and wondered what they were and why that name. Research showed me that the term Vaseline was just a slang description of a genre of trade beads that were generally bright in color. They may be found in lots of bright colors and the yellow beads reminded people of the old Vaseline jars. They were made in Bohemia circa 1830-1915 by skilled Czech glass bead makers. At first the beads were formed in a hand held mold, then faceted by hand. They were a popular trade item to Africa. Uranium salts were used as a yellow colorant and, as a wonderful fun side effect, yellow and green glass beads containing uranium salts fluoresce under ultraviolet light, so keep your eye out for these trade beads as they are really unusual and beautiful. Don’t worry, they are considered safe because vitrification, the process of turning into glass by heat, “traps” the uranium inside the glass.

The glass used to make these big round red trade beads was probably colored with gold chloride for that lovely rich color. The opaque dark reds are called Cranberry Bohemian glass.  When the Bohemians first started making red glass they were competing with the Germans in Idar-Oberstien for the gem industry.  Idar-Oberstien gem and stone cutters were the most skilled and spectacular in the world and they still are, but the Bohemians figured they might corner the Imitation gem stone market with cut glass gemstones. If they couldn’t get the real gem market, then they’d get the imitation gem market.  At that time in history Garnets were the jewelry rage! So making deep red glass imitation “stones” was their specialty and from that came the deep bright red beads. We’re talking mid 1800’s here. People come to us with jewelry from their great grandmother, so sure that they are real stones, and it’s often sad to check them out and have to tell them that they are not rubies or garnets but glass. They have a hard time believing that imitation gemstones were made that long ago.

There are other red beads in this necklace with an interesting history and they are the Hudson’s Bay White Hearts, the little red beads with white centers called their white hearts.  Check out what I’ve written about them on the Trade bead photo of necklace #1. These are definitely one of the most traded beads by the Mountain men Fur trappers to the Indians of North America.  “The earliest examples, prior to 1890, are made by melting 2 layers of glass over a wire rod which produced a hole when cooled and slipped off. This method can be identified by the visible spiral lines which are produced when the glass is wrapped around the wire. Most all of the early white center beads made for North America were made in this manner.” (1)

Also a few red “Gooseberries” are on this necklace. Gooseberries are an interesting glass bead. They can be several different basic colors but always striped with white.  They can be possibly Dutch, Chinese or Roman and usually very, very old, most at least 300 yrs.  They are made by applying stringers of white glass to a large tube of the basic color then heated to melting and then pulled long, cooled, cut, and polished.  So the stripes are part of the glass, not painted on. I love them!

The medium size opaque red ovals are Chinese made.  I picked them up from a bead trader in Oregon many years ago. He claimed they were old and I believe him because he had quite an extensive collection of antique beads and seemed to know his stuff! And the small reds are my favorite spacer Czechs.

(1)  Preston and Carolyn Miller, Indian Trade Goods and Replicas, 1998