Chinese Seed Beads

Chinese Seed Beads from Halcraft Collection are a very colorful and inexpensive spacer bead for any jewelry designs. The method for producing proper seed beads (called seed beads because of their small size) goes back to the early 1400's in Murano, Italy, which is a small island off of the coast near Venice. This is where the Millefiori beads were first perfected, which was made by a process of stretching out patterns in glass while the glass was molten-hot. The same laws of physics that allow one to stretch out a cane of glass with an intricate design in it, allows one to stretch out a cane with hole in the center into a long tube with a hole that shrinks at the same rate as the walls of the tube. Once these "canes" of hollow glass are cut down into hundreds of tiny pieces, they are then sent to tumbling machines for over 72 hours, creating rounded "tubes" of glass.

Depending on how precise the stretching length is and the starting size of the cane is, the beads can be created to be extremely uniform inside and out. Many different colors can be made, so these seed beads can come in a multitude of base colors and surface finishes.

Halcraft Collection carries hundreds of different colors and finishes of Chinese Seed Beads in a variety of sizes, and we hope that you will consider using them as a beautiful and bright spacer bead in any of your jewelry designs.