Any idea of approx. date? Venetian I assume.
Any other nice purchases? Sorry, I'm a bit nosy but any Tucson 'feel' I can capture through BCN members' finds and pictures is a bit like peeping through the big Tucson doors.

more picture to come!

about my description on this bead. It does not have superficial layers, but rather is a wound bead with white trail decoration. Faux chevron may be a little far fetched as this bead is without the rosetta pattern. This bead looks more like older blue drawn beads that do not have the star pattern.

Thanks,
Matt

a big a speo bead, would that be correct?

would be my attempt to describe it.........

I am still on my journey getting around bead production & history. So please bear with me.

I retrieved these 2 pictures from Tasart which show several types of a speo, at least I thought. With chevron layers inside, with drawn stripes, without stripes....
So I thought the moment there is at least one inner layer drawn, sorry which in reality are 3, like the blue/white bead below it can be considered an 'a speo'. In this way a Nueva Cádiz is an a speo and the chevron a special a speo?????

So the not finished a speo aspect of Matt's bead, does it have to do with the vertical lines, which here were not obtained from drawn cane but added through lampwork ? Yet there is a drawn inner layer-- (sorry 3 ). Is it then 'a dilettante' a speo ;-)? I am completely confused now. Is there a strict definition of an a speo? All help is welcome :-)

Matt's beads was made as an individual bead, then decorated with white trailing. It is a lamp-worked bead rather than a bead cut off a drawn cane.

A speo refers to a heat-treated drawn bead, which when cut off the cane would have squared-off ends. Placing the bead back into a flame or furnace either on a spit (a speo) or loose, was a technique to round off the cut edges. Presumably this was easier and faster than hand-faceting the edges.

So, neither the number of layers nor type of layers (star-pattern or smooth), nor outside stripes, has anything to do with whether the bead was heated after it was cut off the cane.

If I'm not badly mistaken this is how the term "a speo" is used.

I sure missed the ball on that one!

Strange though how most a speo beads known to me -but maybe that says more about me- are layered drawn black, blue with white.... I guess these visuals fooled me and fed my ignorance.

What about millefiori beads with rounded ends: I never seem to have read these were a speo; or oval striped beads or those oval melon beads, these should be a speo beads as well I thought. Can't remember them being described as a speo... or have I missed something else?

Can't you get the same rounded effect via lampwork, and how do you see the difference,.... or am I looking for trouble now ;-)

Hi Martine,
Normally, it's easy to determine whether a bead was cut off from a drawn cane. I'd say the vast majority have concentric layers, even if there are only two. Solid color drawn beads also were made - but most of those were much smaller, typically known as seed beads. Smaller drawn beads were normally re-heated on big trays to round the edges.

Millies and "fancy" beads were made one by one in a torch. The shapes can be round, oval, cylindrical, etc and the ends can be rounded during the making of the bead. For most but not all of these you can see the swirling of the glass which was wound around a mandrel.

So, the two processes are very different - in one case, many identical beads are cut from a cane, and in the other case, individual beads (which are not identical, but can be close) were made one at a time by a lampwork artist.

And remember, a speo means that the bead was placed on a rod for re-heating. For reasons of labor intensity, this was only done for larger, more valuable beads. Just because smaller drawn beads were re-heated does not make them "a speo" beads. So the oval melon beads you mentioned were likely not re-heated on a rod. That's why the holes often appear squished out of round and irregular.

Hope this helps.

All this talk about Tucson has me reminiscing on how much I enjoyed being there seeing old friends and maybe buying beads was fun also.

I was going through my photo files and found a file named "Tucson 2005". It was a group of quick shots of some of the various beads I bought that year.

Below is a contact sheet of some of them (believe it or not there was quite a few more). I went crazy that year.

I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed buying them.

Jan

Another group from Tucson, 2006: