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Bead & Pearl Supplies: MrBead Shop
Content:
Bead Fair Reports
Mr & Mrs Bead’s Downtime
Cinnabar Beads
Pearls For June
The Secrets of Pearls
Knotting a Pearl Necklace
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Can only be used at the MrBead shop & not with any other coupon. To get the discount Key NORWICH at checkout now, as offer ends Friday 9th June 2023. Use at: https://mrbeadshop.com.
To watch a short video of the show click: New Forest, Welsh & Cornish Bead Fairs
Then last bank-holiday weekend we took our boat out. The first time Rosey was out in 12-months. Often if we have free time between bead fairs, we prefer to go to the Europe Coast, rather than the Norfolk Broads again.
For a Short Video Click: Norfolk Broad Boat Trip
Technically, Cinnabar is mercury sulfide, found near recent volcanic activity. Its name comes from Medieval Latin ‘cinnabaris’; Red lead. Because of its red colour, powdered cinnabar was used during ancient times for “war” and ceremonial face and body paint. It was popular in ancient Greece and 16th-century Spain.The Romans used it for lipstick, despite the toxicity of mercury in cinnabar being well known before 2000 B.C – when slaves and prisoners mining the ore died after three-years. However, the Chinese during the Song Dynasty, reduced the risk by using lacquer over the cinnabar carvings onto chests, candle sticks, snuff bottles and other ornaments.
Today, the toxic pigment is replaced by a resin-based polymer that looks the same as the pigmented lacquer. Most beads and jewellery sold as cinnabar now, consist of a carved wood base covered by layers of resin, and are totally harmless.
Click To See All Our Cinnabar Beads
Pearls are expected to be expensive and in short supply
Pearl jewellery sells because people understand pearls are natural. However, since the 1950s, natural pearls have been cultivated by man – making them much cheaper to buy. This means that including them in jewellery, you will make you even more profit!
What are Cultured Pearls?
The least expensive cultured pearls today rival the most expensive natural pearls ever found. Cultured freshwater pearls occur in mussels for the same reason saltwater pearls occur in oysters.
Foreign material inside a mussel can’t be expelled. To reduce irritation, the mollusk coats the intruder with the same secretion it uses for shell-building, nacre. To cultivate a pearl, farmers slit the mussel and insert small pieces of live tissue from another mussel.
The ancient Chinese practiced this technique, but the first real cultured freshwater pearls originated from Japan in the 1930’s.Japanese farmers by Lake Biwa achieved natural colours previously unseen in saltwater pearls. China now has the resources that Japan lacks: many large lakes, rivers, and a low-cost work force. China has now revolutionized pearling – shapes, lustre, and colours of Chinese pearls now surpass Biwa quality.Copying the Japanese to improve off-white and mottling, China uses a mild bleach, bright lights, and heat. Natural freshwater pearls are usually odd shapes. So for more roundness, they reshape rejected pearls into spheres, and then nucleate mussels with them.
Freshwater pearls are popular for their colours: white, silvery-white, pink, red, copper, brown, lavender, purple, green, blue, and yellow. The most desirable are the pastel pinks, roses, lavenders, and purples. Natural colour comes from the mussel species and water quality – with pearls taking the colour of the shell in which they form. However, permanent dyes are used today for saturated colours.
The Best Pearls
Good pearls have thick overlapping layers of nacre. This can be tested by viewing its “lustre”. Roll the pearl with a pen in bright light – the best pearls will reflect the pen more.
A large pearl is only more valuable if it’s the same quality as a smaller one – the rounder the better. Being an organic gem, grooves, pits, or dents are expected.
What is Mother-of-Pearl?
The shining, playful, reflected light of mother-of-pearl has attracted attention since ancient times. The natural material has always been popular.From then, different technology has turned mother-of-pearl into many uses, apart from jewellery. Today, it’s dyed every colour under the sun – creating attractive jewellery at affordable prices.
The mollusk forms mother-of-pearl as a protective shell. Like the pearl it’s a secretion of the mantle, composed of alternate layers of calcium carbonate and conchiolin.
See our Mother of Pearl Beads
Glass Pearls
As the name, these are coated glass to look like the best quality pearls. Any pearl that is a perfect round shape without any grooving, will either cost thousands or made of glass!
However, glass pearls are fantastic value for money and have a big place making affordable fashion jewellery. To see our colourful range of glass pearls at under £1.25 a string, click here.
Matching Pearls
Matching pearls isn’t easy, but is important when designing jewellery. It’s an art in itself, requiring a sharp eye, judgment, and experience. Try to buy all the pearls for a project at the same time, as later batches may not match. When balancing pearls for jewellery, you need to consider:
There’s a few ways to knot a beaded necklace, but this is the easiest for beginners. First choose your cord: either silk or nylon. Silk is traditional, however it can snag and fray. Both come in different colours and sizes – thicker cord for larger beads. For beginner’s technique, two strands are put through each bead, so a thinner size is needed. For 6mm beads, use size 2 for this technique, and try to match the colour of the cord with the colour of the beads. A popular way to start any beaded necklace is with bead tips. The only difference here is that two strands of the cord are inserted through the bead tip instead of one. This is easier than using one strand of cord, and the results look almost the same.
Professional Testing
If you want to buy expensive pearls that are perfectly matched, a gemmologist certificate is essential. It costs about £100 for a test, as opposed to several-thousands for the type that warrant the test. An x-ray will show variations in density inside of the pearl and the characteristic shapes of drill holes.
The Tooth Test
Rub the surface of the pearl over your teeth – a real pearl feels gritty, while a faux pearl feels smooth. Real pearls are made up of layers of nacre that are deposited like sand on a beach. The slight waves in the nacre give a bumpy feeling against the teeth. However, dye can fill in natural depressions.
Close Inspection
Look at the pearls in bright light. Unless they’re very expensive, genuine pearls have slight variations in shape, size and colour – along with grooves in their nacre, with ridges or pits. If any are perfect sphere or grainy smooth: they’re suspect. Cutting a pearl open reveals everything. Natural pearls are comprised of many layers of nacre. Cultured pearls have a mother-of-pearl shell core covered with a thin layer of nacre. Fake pearls have a core with one or more layers of coating which tends to flake away on cutting.
Pearl Holes
Examine drill holes to see the nacre layers and what lies beneath. Real pearls are usually drilled from both sides to meet in the middle – making the hole appear wider at the outside edges. Holes of fake pearls are usually strait and are more likely to be larger. Cheap real pearls may not be drilled straight, making a necklace hang badly, unless it’s knotted.
Other Clues
Real pearls are heavier for their size than fakes. Other signs are that a genuine pearl necklace is more likely to be knotted and set in gold, or silver. You can examine clasps for stamps in the metal. The clasp should have a safety mechanism – no one would use insecure clasps on good pearls. Sometimes fakes are made to look irregular, and glass pearls often have flattened ends. Genuine pearls warm to the skin faster than glass pearls – while plastic pearls tend to feel warm right away.
Faux Pearls
Faux pearls, although manmade, are not necessarily a cheap substitute to the real thing. They have genuine beauty of their own, looking “almost” the same as natural pearls costing thousands. They’re created by coating the outside of glass with pearl powder. This is then dipped into various solutions of pearl film to simulate the lustre of a natural pearl.
Pearl Folk Lore
There are an almost infinite number of myths and folk lore associated with pearls. Many pearl web sites included their own version of pearl myths. Here are a few that I found:
Click To See All Our Many Pearl Beads
For the full list so far click: 2023 Bead Fairs.
Can only be used at the MrBead shop & not with any other coupon. To get the discount Key NORWICH at checkout now, as offer ends Friday 9th June 2023. Use at: https://mrbeadshop.com.
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