I have several shades of purple from Toho beads (Japanese seed beads)
that I've used a lot. So far, no fading, peeling or color loss.

If you don't have local sources, here's a couple of links:

http://www.bobbybead.com/toho.htm

http://members.tripod.com/~cbbeads/index.htm

The first vendor will sell in bulk quantities at a big savings, if you
know what you want.

The second one has some 'starter' samplers, one of which includes
whole range of purples from more than one Japanese brand, not just
Toho. I think the site uses a letter-code to identify the brand, and
they have more Miyuki colors than Toho colors.

General Bead also has a good representation of Toho beads, but I
haven't checked their purples selection lately.

My favorite Toho purple is Color #928, Purple-lined Light Amethyst,
which is fairly intensely purple. But there are several other shades
as well.

The color chart on the Bobby Bead site takes a while to load on
dial-up, but is worth the wait. If your monitor is fairly color-true,
you can trust what you see about as well as anything you can't see
'live' and in daylight.

Good luck. Purples are notoriously hard to make in glass, so there is
a reason why you are having this problem.

Deirdre

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003 08:09:28 -0400, "angela"
wrote:

I am having terrible luck with purple beads and I'm sure someone here can
tell me why. I bought purple crackle beads at Michael's and the coating
peeled off. Okay, I got them from Michael's so I wasn't exactly shocked.
Then I got two different sizes of purple seed beads from Beadazzled and it
looks more like they faded, but they may have actually peeled too. Then I
got some from Joanne's -- I don't know what they're called but they're the
kind where the color is in the middle (if that makes any sense). I sort of
expected the color to fall apart on me and it did. All of the beads were
used on bracelets and deteriorated after heavy wear (my four-year-old son
wears his bracelet 24 hours a day). Is there such a thing as a purple bead
that keeps its color?

ang.
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