| Original Message: "Wedding Cake Beads" - What's In A Name? |
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Here's a photograph of a strand of beads I bought at the Alameda Flea Market in the early 1970s. I paid about $12. for it, because it had a broken bead, and the seller wanted to get rid of it. There are more than one type of bead on the strand, but most or all are Venetian, and many of them are what I would characterize with the name "wedding cake" beads, as I understood that name at that time. Wedding cake beads were small delicately trailed confections often in pale and ivory tones, that included either gold foil or avventurina, raised wobbly lines, and the suggestion of flowers. The name seems pretty apt. When I look at this strand, I wonder if it consists mainly of beads pulled from a sample card, to which have been added a few others—since there are hardly two that are alike, yet most are technically similar, even though of different color schemes. In intervening years, many times, I was shown beads that I was told were "wedding cake" beads. And my response was that these were not the wedding cake beads I know—though they are similar later beads of similar manufacture. So, this suggests the question, "what is a 'wedding cake' bead, and what distinguishes it from other similar or dissimilar beads"? Is the category broader than I suppose; or is the name applied to a greater range of beads than may have originally been intended (for reasons that we are all familiar with—having to do with name-recognition, prestige, supposed rarity, and increased value)? Jamey All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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