Welcome on BeadMatch

If you are looking for hard to find colors and sizes, check out our new Vintage Italian Seed Beads. We offer over 100 new colors and sizes, plus a fresh selection of Pony Beads at your disposal. We offer parfleche painting cookies are now ready for painting rawhide bags and envelopes. These parfleche painting cookies are made the Old Way. These rawhide painting cookies have not been readily available for nearly a century or more!


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Italian seed beads

We have just added a 7th and 8th sample card to our original set of four sample cards. The fifth sample card contains vintage Italian micro seed beads. These beads are used for doll making, peyote fan making, fan making and other projects where very small Italian seed beads are required. These beads are now being used by the very best Native American Indian doll makers on the planet. Our blues are rare shades in much demand as well as th eyellows and some of the other colors.

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Bells and painting cookies

One of our favorite art and craft forms is American Indian Parfleche. This is truly a beautiful form of Indian Craft. Many of the old American Indian parfleche bags or parfleche cases and other painted American Indian rawhide pieces in museum and private collections were painted with cookies. We have made every effort to revive the cookies as they were found on the Plains and the Plateau before 1900.
We offer also Ermine/Weasels skins/hides.

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Reproduction Save List Stroud Cloth

We are very proud to offer to you best in the market reproduction old save list cloth. Our cloth is 100% wool made in England to our strict specifications. We produced a variety of grades and styles to match our samples of old Save List Stroud cloth that we had. We dye our cloth by hand here in United States using the same technique to produce the desired Save list results. . We also offer styles of cloth dyed with natural indigo dye.

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Craft Materials

With over two decades of craft experience, we are pleased to bring to you the best materials for making Native American crafts. They are also great for restoration and reproduction work. Check our cotton threads, beading needles, bees wax, brass bells, etc.





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Brained Tan Hides

We hand tan our own hides, using traditional brain tanning methods for deer, antelope and elk hides, smoked or white. The hides are soft and pliable and a needle will easily go through the brain tanned hide. They are great for making moccasins, leggings, shirts, pipe bags, etc.. We also make rawhide and no chemicals are used in any of the tanning process.



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Books

We will try to bring you a few titles that will be useful to those who either are interested in American Indian beadwork, those who actually make things with seed beads (Italian seed beads) , or those who do research into the broad area of American Indian Studies (Native American Studies). Some of the titles that will be added to this category are out of print meaning they are no longer available from the publisher, some are new books of interest that we deem appropriate for the site.

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The best in vintage Italian seed beads!

We carry Vintage Italian Seed Beads, Stroud save-list wool cloth, Paints for Painting Parfleche the Old Way, reproduction Stroud save-list English 100% wool cloth, Ermine/Weasel skins, Selected Books, Old Hawk Bells, Special Lighting for the Craft Worker and Collector. A love of American Indian Art especially in the form of beadwork had motivated us to search the international market for vintage seed beads, specifically "Italian seed beads", and more specifically "vintage Italian seed beads". By sheer happenstance we were able to make contacts through friendship, and we were alerted to an old warehouse with a stock of vintage Italian seed beads. Vintage Italian seed beads are the seed beads of choice for doing repair/restoration, replication, and newly designed pieces in the old style and traditions in the era from 1865 through 1900. We will do our best to match and/or provide the vintage seed bead colors and sizes that you need to acquire to complete your repair/restoration, replication, and new project. We have sold our stock of vintage seed beads to the top restoration experts in North America Indian Art. We have also sold vintage Italian seed beads to the author of the leading book on the subject of crafting and creating Native American beadwork, in fact that is the title of the book, Native American Beadwork by Georg Barth (# ISBN-10: 0936984120 # ISBN-13: 978-0936984124). His exclamation upon receiving the bead cards, and then making a major purchase was "The vintage seed beads -- WHAT CAN I SAY??? DREAM BEADS!!!" We hope to do the same for you, supply you with vintage Italian seed beads that you consider as "Dream Beads!!!"

You can browse our vintage Italian seed bead samples on our on line bead sample cards, we strongly urge you to buy the 6 card set of vintage Italian seed bead samples. Why? Because the cards have actual samples of the beads sewn to them and there is no better way to select the vintage beads that are right for you and the piece you have in mind to create, replicate, and/or restore!

Ermine skins and Weasels hides

Ermine skins and Weasels hides

We have a limited supply of craft grade ermine a few times a year and when we have those they will be listed here. These were an instant sellout at the 2007 Material Culture of the Plains, Prairie, and Plateau Conference held at Lewiston, Idaho. We were able to obtain more. These are perfect for tube drops and ermine bonnets.

Photos

Plateau Moccasins, Nez Perce Museum

We presented an some images of a very colorful pair of moccasins, shirts, horse collar and tipi and pipe bags from the Plateau. On the Plateau most of the collected moccasins are of the side seam type. In this photo we are referring to the center pair, not the two singles at each side.


Contact Information

Marie & Andrew Gussmann, PO Box 1995, Browning, MT 59417-1995
phone: 406-450-5876
mail: beadmatchbeads@gmail.com