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A bead is a small, decorative object that is formed in a variety of shapes and sizes of a material such as stone, bone, shell, glass, plastic, wood, or pearl and with a small hole for threading or stringing. Beads range in size from under 1 millimeter (0.039 in) to over 1 centimeter (0.39 in) in diameter.
The name is the word for shell bead in the Eastern Keresan language of the Santo Domingo Indians. [ 2 ] The oldest specimens of heishe date back to around 6000 BCE, although the same technique was used in northern Africa 30,000 years ago, using ostrich eggshell.
Two principal techniques are used to produce seed beads: the wound method and the drawn method. The wound method is the more-traditional technique, is more time-consuming, and is no longer used in modern bead production: in this technique, a chunk of glass known in glassmaking as a gather and composed mainly of silica is heated on an iron bar until molten.
Each bead is the beach-worn apex of a cone snail. Such shells are often strung as necklaces, known as puka shell necklaces. Puka is the Hawaiian word for "hole" and refers to the naturally occurring hole in the middle of these rounded and worn shell fragments. Numerous inexpensive imitations are now widely sold as puka shell necklaces.
Beading Wire is a stranded stainless steel wire with a nylon coating. It is good to use with abrasive beads. A thinner wire will give an appealing drape to lightweight beads such as gemstone heishe, liquid gold, or liquid silver and bugle or seed beads. A thicker weight wire should be used to accommodate larger, heavier bead strands.
Wampum beads are typically tubular in shape, often a quarter of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. One 17th-century Seneca wampum belt featured beads almost 2.5 inches (65 mm) long. [1] Women artisans traditionally made wampum beads by rounding small pieces of whelk shells, then piercing them with a hole before stringing them.