This internationally unique glass seed bead, which can only be produced by glassmakers with many years of experience, is only made by Preciosa Ornela in the Czech Republic.
The PRECIOSA Cornelian is distinguished by a combination of two types of glass:
white chalk and a transparent colored glass.
PRECIOSA Cornelian is a rocaille with a round hole, an intermediate layer of white chalk with a rounded surface and a covering layer of transparent glass. Put very simply, it can be said that this involves a seed bead with a white centre, sometimes called a “white heart”, with a transparent colored surface.
The top layers of the seed beads come in purple, red, blue, green, turquoise, yellow, orange and black.
The combination of the white centre and the transparent glass surface gives rise to an interesting color effect involving the shading of the surface, which especially stands out in the larger sizes.
We offer the PRECIOSA Cornelian in sizes ranging from 1/0 to 10/0 and 34 to 31.
There is also a second type of PRECIOSA Cornelian, namely the PRECIOSA Cornelian Star.
Don’t hesitate to order these seed beads which may one day become a rarity!
Round hole, round profile
Art. No.: 311 19 001
Sizes: 10/0, 9/0, 8/0, 7/0, 6/0, 5/0, 4/0, 3/0, 2/0, 1/0, 31, 32, 33, 34
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 34, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
Sizes: 33, 8/0
You can see much more works of our designers, such as Kerrie Slade and Alexandra Lysenko.
Contact your nearest dealers of the PRECIOSA beads and seed beads
We distribute Czech glass beads and seed beads with the PRECIOSA Traditional Czech Beads™ brand all over the world. You can buy them from our distributors.
As the name itself suggests, the history of the genesis of cornelian seed beads is closely associated with precious stones.
In the 18th century, the glassworks in the Jizera Mountains succeeded in offering a very wide spectrum of glass colors and combinations.
The local craftsmen were especially known for their skill in making glass that resembled precious and semi-precious stones, which were fashionable at that time.
People throughout the world loved the glass stones and beads produced here and, when the mass production of seed beads took off in the second half of the 19th century, so too did the demand for more expensive variants of seed beads created by combining different colors of glass. This gave rise to a seed bead with a white core and a reddish outer layer, which was supposed to imitate a cornelian stone.
The first Cornelian seed bead was produced with transparent glass in a red-brown shade on a white chalk base and it was supposed to imitate this type of semi-precious stone.
The photograph can help you compare a natural cornelian stone with one of the first seed beads on a more than one-hundred-year-old color card.
This initial version of the seed bead eventually led to the creation of an entire range of seed beads with a “white heart”. Other shades were gradually added to the range and the original look of the reddish shade disappeared.
