Vintage Painted Enamel Flower Parts
Enamel painted vintage flower parts in metals are a throw-back to digging through my Grandmother’s jewelry box. Brightly colored daisy pins or black & white deco floral pendants in boldly stated shapes and colors can be reproduced using authentically vintage parts from the 1960’s era. These components are mostly 1-sided meaning the ‘backs’ are raw. Stack them using wire-working techniques to re-create brooches, pendants for de-contructed chain necklaces, funky cuff bracelets with a floral centerpiece and more.
See all Products in our Vintage Showcase
Vintage Soft Plastic Flowers
Another breed of vintage flowers, these soft plastic pieces have a funky, kitschy, cool element. Unlike our German lucite flowers, these pieces were made in ca. 1960’s-80’s in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and possess an edgier look in opaque colors and textural shapes. Priced a bit lower than their German counterparts, these beads are in fact more limited in that no one to my knowledge is reproducing them yet.
See all Products in our Vintage Showcase
Vintage Swarovski Ribbed Round Beads
Article 5030 is one of Swarovski’s lesser known, un-faceted beads. For a while in the 1980’s and early 1990’s Swarovski experimented with a bead that contained a lower lead content to provide a sleeker, non-traditional crystal that perhaps was more cost effective than it’s heavily leaded and machine-cut counterparts. Even by our definition, 1980’s and 1990’s is not a vintage bead. However in the Swarovski category through out the bead market, it has become customary to call out of program Swarovski that has not been produced for a while (our rule of thumb is 10 years) as ‘vintage’. These beads, although not faceted, still possess that unique light refraction and highest quality that we have come to expect from Swarovski.
See all Products in our Vintage Showcase
Vintage Japanese Foil Glass Beads
This is the bead that makes this collector and designer swoon. These beads were produced mostly ca. 1940’s – 1960’s in Japan. Back when we first started dealing in vintage beads in the early ‘90’s it wasn’t uncommon to stumble on these beads in their original boxes marked “Made in Occupied Japan” alluding to the period of American occupation after the war. Borrowing technique from the Venetian glass houses, these beads are lampworked and then sometimes pressed after the glass became molten to create a smooth or mottled texture and make the beads more uniform. The cores were made ‘foiled’ by using metals such as silver leaf, and gold and platinum foils. These beads are becoming seriously rare to find in any quantity or consistency making this line of 3 colors a true treasure.
See all Products in our Vintage Showcase 
