What are Rocailles? Also known as Seed beads and how are Seed beads different from other beads like Preciosa Crystal Beads? Many of you have been asking about Preciosa Seed Beads over the last few months and we at Bluestreak Crystals are proud to introduce the long awaited ‘Ornela' Seed Bead range from Preciosa! The Ornela range includes several colours and you can see them up close being poured into our bead storage box on YouTube:
Preciosa Seed Beads are a popular choice for bead weaving and embroidery that uses a lot of stitching, like beaded cuffs and collars or sections of embroidery on clothing. Preciosa Seed Beads are made of coloured glass and often come with a silver coating inside the bead hole, which helps the colour shimmer in the light. Unlike Bicone beads, the seed beads are not multi-faceted, but are smooth and this makes them feel softer against the skin. Famous names for seed beads include Japanese Miyuki and Toho, which include differently shaped beads like Delica, Bugle, Magatamas, Tila etc. The Preciosa Seed Beads on our website have both a round profile and a round hole and come from the famous Crystal Valley in the Czech Republic where they have been manufactured since the 18th Century.
A common question is ‘What size seed beads do I need?” This is understandable because the sizing system for seed beads is different to other styles of bead. Bicones and round beads are measured in mm however, seed beads use numbers to represent sizes. The smaller the number, the larger the bead and the popular sizes typically range between 6 and 16 however they can go bigger and a lot smaller.
The way the size system works for Preciosa seed beads is that all sizes are in relation to the original bead size zero. Therefore, a size 10 bead is 10 times smaller than a size 0 bead, this is shown as ‘10/0’ or simply ‘size 10’ on the packet.
The common sizes for seed beads that you’ll find in our Preciosa Ornela collection are:
