Vintage Cabochons: New Possibilities

For years and years when we’d hunt for vintage beads, we’d stumble on luscious leaded glass chunky stones, table cut marbleized vintage glass slabs, and darling pictorials featuring Victorian scenes and to our dismay – none of them had holes!!! Most of you have probably read Dara’s recent blog on drilling lovely finds into usable beads and pendants with a traditional hole. That woman is sheer genius. How many of you went to ‘the depot’ and grabbed up a dremel tool? However we’d find the undrilled goodies in such volume that the idea of hand-drilling these parts was just overwhelming. But we still bought them. Or some of them. And believe it or not, we’d hardly put them out in the store. We, along with many of our customers, would be perplexed by these beauties and how to use them in our beadwork. With the exception of the beadweavers who would create bezel harnesses around cabochons, a lot of us were just stuck as far as new and exciting design ideas using cabs and parts with no holes.

The times are changing! Just google cabs on the web and you’ll find designers gluing them, setting them, metal-smithing them in cups and bezels, using them in mosaic work, and just down-right bathing in them. Well maybe they’re not bathing in them – but it really does seem as if the creative floodgates have lifted and there are so many inspiring options out there to utilize these holeless treasures.

Here are a couple of design ideas on our own BeadinPath.com: Vintage Lucite Cabochon Rings - We found some vintage metal adjustable ‘gumball’ rings. These are actually a very nice quality plated finding, that is just perfect for adhering vintage cabs and creating darling and versatile rings. And at a fantabulous price! Easy! Easy! Funky Diva Lockets - Glue cabs of all types onto layers of beads – shell, metal, glass or anything with a hole! These lockets are darling layered with shell and Lucite.

Although we offer cabochons in many materials, our vintage stock focuses centrally around glass and Lucite. Our Lucite cabs came from our warehouse buy back in 2004 where we cleaned out over 40,000 lbs of old Lucite beads and parts from Plastic Development in Warwick Rhode Island. This company, originally known as Best Plastics in Providence, had manufactured these cabs and beads for design houses such as Avon, Trifari, Coro and more. Read more about our company's vintage Lucite stock. So fear not! If you stumble upon a scrumptious jewelry component and GASP ‘There’s no hole!’, despair not! There are countless possibilities for those treasures. And they could just be that unusual jewelry component that sets you apart in a competitive jewelry design market. Think beyond the holes!