The past week has thrown up a few unexpected issues, like the sudden need to migrate my website to a new server! So there was a point at which I wondered whether I would be posting this blog at all! Happily, thanks to the services of Dan at Patchrobe, my website now seems to be up and running as usual, so my ‘Knight in Shining Armour Award’ for the week goes to Dan – very, very big thank you!
Anyway, back to the theme in question and this is something I’ve been meaning to write about for several months. I was reminded of the subject again at the end of June when I went down to Exeter for my beady photo shoot. In a break between photos and videos, I was lucky enough to see Vivienne’s collection of Chevron beads. On a previous visit, Vivienne had been telling me a bit about the history or these very collectible beads, so I was thrilled to see the Chevron bead necklaces that she bought whilst in Africa.
For anyone who, like me, doesn’t know what Chevron beads are, they were originally manufactured in fifteenth century Venice. They are made by layering different coloured glass, creating a long cane that is then cut into smaller bead-sized pieces. Recently, I’ve had a few conversations that have turned to people asking me how the beads we all use are made. The short answer is that I am a little hazy on this, so I’ve made a promise to myself to try and find out a little more and the Chevron beads seemed like a good place to start. I imagine that the major manufacturers keep their processes fairly secret as this is, after all, their trade. I know this is certainly the case with Swarovski crystals – the Swarovski factory in Austria is very secretive about the precise processes that are used to create their crystals. So only they know just what it is that makes their crystal so shiny!
Back to the Chevron beads, as I was looking at the beads and listening to the description of how they are created, I was reminded of the glass blowing demonstration I was lucky enough to see in Venice. This wasn’t making Chevron beads, but the practise of manipulating the glass under flame and stretching and shaping the molten glass into long canes is similar. A Chevron bead begins life as a small ball of molten glass (called a ‘gather’) into which an air bubble is blown. The gather is then plunged into a star shaped mould. Layers of coloured glass are then applied and when all the layers have been added, the small ball of glass is stretched into a long cane. As it stretches, the central air bubble elongates, becoming the hole in the middle of the glass. The cane is cooled and then cut into bead sized lengths that can then be bevelled or ground to reveal the star shape on the ends (from the side only the single colour of the outer layer is visible). As a broad rule, the more layers in the bead, the more valuable it is.
This is all interesting enough – pretty amazing actually to think of this industry going on 600 years ago. As a historian, I also find the story of how and where these little beads travelled, just as interesting. These little beads can also be referred to as ‘Trade Beads’. Dutch merchants were the first to use these beads for trade, in the late fifteenth Century. Mostly they were taken to West Africa, but some were also traded with the Americas – some 7-layered Chevrons have been found in Peru and are thought to have been taken there by Columbus. The darker side of this history lies in the Slave Trade. These little beads were so highly valued by the West Africans that they were prepared to sell not just goods, but people, in exchange for beads. The irony is that to the European traders, the beads probably had relatively little value in their native land – certainly they could not have been used to purchase goods in Europe, but to the Africans their value was enormous, enough to give away a human life. Nowadays the situation has turned around – collectors from the ‘developed’ world are paying large sums of money to buy these beads that Africans have passed down through the generations. Apparently some of the beads were so precious that they were buried in the ground for safe-keeping, only to be dug up in the modern age to be traded on different terms. That’s not to say that the beads have lost their value in Africa – they are still worn today as symbols of prestige or for ceremonial purposes, even buried with the dead.
Actually holding Vivienne’s strings of Chevron beads gave me a similar feeling to that which I felt in the library whilst working on my thesis. There is something amazing and humbling about handling an object that was first produced 500 or 600 years ago, whether it’s a book or a bead. Just think of everything it has experienced and survived and the stories it could tell if it could talk.
I wouldn’t trade another human being for a bead, but it did make me think about how much all us, perhaps slightly crazy, beaders value our own bead stashes – all the memories they hold and the promise of the objects that they will become. Yet this is something that we all share with many, many older generations from all over the world. So, perhaps I’ll do a little more investigating and see what else I can find out about modern day bead manufacture, although I am slightly concerned that this journey is going to lead me to making my own beads – I’m already thinking about the possibility of a short lamp-working course…!
