| Original Message: The Chevrons Necklace arrived... |
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...and it's definitely weird. 1) The pearls are the old blown-glass variety with wax filling 2) The black beads with the delicate feathery tracery are a very black black - I tried looking at them in sunlight with my loupe, inspecting every likely pit and edge I could find, and no flash or red or purple. They're like opaque obsidian. 3) Oddly, ends of lamp beads are either worn or polished flat - some actually show parallel polish marks. 4) The white beads with the blue and pink festoons are practically brand new - shiny and bright, albeit with dirt in the winding marks around the holes. I was interested to see that the dirty smears that occur on these beads appear in fact to be lampwork artifacts - as if the beadmaker got the glass too close to the smoky end of the flame. Actual lampworkers may want to weigh in here. 5) The oval bead with what appears to be red-white-blue-white-blue cane chips isn't crizzled or corroded - it's shiny because it's covered all over with tiny, tiny fractures, as if someone took a little hammer to it. It feels rough. 6) The chevron cores were star-molded. Two have set-in canes, one has set-in alternating rods of ochre and brick. Curiously, the base glass on this last one is a pistachio green. The rims of the one with the set in yellow-red-white-blue are still shiny and were not ground. 7) The stringing is on what looks like some sort of doubled old woven fishing line, white with green weave markers. The little metal beads are all corroded, some to green. Maybe they were once steel-cuts plated with brass? Or not steel at all, but copper/brass? I was going to take everything apart before taking photographs, but then it occurred to me that maybe I should leave it intact. Opinions, anyone? Intact or take it apart? Really bad photos attached, more later. It's hard for me to get a good close-up at less than 169kb. All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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