Chinese Seed Beads from Halcraft Collection are a colorful and inexpensive spacer bead option for any jewelry design. Seed beads get their name from their small size, similar to a tiny seed. The method for producing proper seed beads goes back to the early 1600s in Murano, a small island off the coast of Italy near Venice. This is where the Millefiori beads were first perfected. Millefiori beads are made in a long-held tradition in which stretching out patterns in glass while the glass was molten-hot. The same laws of physics that enable one to stretch out a cane of glass with an intricate design in it, enable one to stretch out a cane with a hole in the center into a long tube with a hole that shrinks at the same rate as the walls of the tube. After 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 tiny, rounded tubes of glass.
Depending on how precise the stretching length is and the starting size of the cane, 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 that are perfect as spacer beads in your creative jewelry designs.
