Effetre 226 Alexandrite

Well - I was excited. The unworked rod was a translucent opal like the CiM moonstone colours - Cirrus and co. But - this glass just went opaque when worked. Pfuui.

I even worked one bead (the rather sloppy disk) cool and didn't melt it down into a spacer in order to see it if would stay translucent - and it was still partially cloudy when it went into the kiln. But, no such luck - it was fully opaque when it came out.

There is a strong colour change in this glass between warm (incandescent) light (pic on left) and cool (fluorescent) light (pic on right). Under a light bulb and in sunlight, it is a definite pale lavender, and in fluorescent lighting (even the good stuff - like an Ott light) - it is a pale blue.

In fact, this reminds me a lot of Effetre 221 Pastel Lavender - which is a colour change as well.

So I dug out some 221. The unworked rods are opaque pink in warm light, which the 226 is translucent pink when directly in warm light, but looks more bluish further away from direct lighting.

In cool, fluorescent lighting, the rods are both blue, but the 221 is paler.







This last pic is a bead made with 221 on left hand of the bead, and 226 on the right, with dots of 226 on the left and 221 on the right. When it went into the kiln - the right hand side was tranparent - and it looked pretty cool. Now - well - if you click on the image for the larger version - you might be able to see that they are dots on it.

I'd hazard to say that 226 and 221 are interchangeable.