CiM 304: Sunny Side Up

Yum! CiM 304 Sunny Side Up is a deep, streaky yellow - like egg yolks! It is a rich, warm colour - and goes a little bit darker and orangey-er than the unworked rod.

I wonder if deep heating it - to clear - would give you a transparent bead? Hmmm.

Perfect colour for the fall, or sunflowers. 

Midnight Deserted

Just trying to recreate a bead that I made a few years ago.

As I remember it, it was:

• clear core
• ivory encase one end
• Sasha's Silver the other - don't make the encasing perfect (holes in the encasing show as dark patches)
• mash

Doesn't look quite the same though. Wonder what I've mis-remembered. 

Keep notes, folks. Keep notes.

Here are the originals - in a necklace.  

Hmmm - the more I look at these - the more I think it wasn't ivory. Maybe DaVinci? And obviously - some have white underneath. Hmmmm.

Brass Stamps!

 The more I use tools for stamping and pressing texture into glass - the more I like them. The very opposite, in fact, of my response to presses for shaping - which, the more I use, the less I like.  ;-)

A friend brought this back for me from her travels - so no idea where it comes from. I just had time for one quick bead with it - but I'm definitely looking forward to using it more.

It really adds interest to a no-interest bead!

Experiment: Hadar's Quick Fire Clay - Copper on a Lampwork Bead

 Some of us will stick anything on a bead. After all - if you don't try - how will you find the next wonderful thing?

Metal Clays - if you haven't been paying attention - have come a long way - with quite a few competing brands and more options than just Fine Silver anymore.

This is a fine powder - you mix it up yourself - from Hadar Jacobsen.

I poured some into a frit tray, made a white bicone, and then rolled the bead in the clay powder.

It needed a lot of heat to get it to stick - much higher than just getting frit to stick to a bead.

Heating the copper clay powder after applying it to the bead made the copper powder go black - no surprise there.

I then encased it, and finished shaping it, and kilned it.

Two observations: One is, I got pretty colours - intense dark reds and some purple blue.

 And the other is - it is massively incompatible. Whoa-nelly - just look at those cracks!

 Although - they just appear to be in the clear. I wonder if I did it again and didn't encase it ... .

PS. I don't know if it gives off toxic fumes. It's didn't smell particularly noxious - but that's not much to go on. It flared up and burned with a greenish flame at one point when I applied it to the bead, but not for more than a half-second. But the point is, I don't know if what I did was stunningly unsafe - if you choose to try this or other things like it - you do so at your own risk.

CiM 206: Macaw Ltd Run

CiM 206 Macaw Ltd Run is a transparent orange, that needs to be struck to reach it's full colour potential. 














This bead was made and put directly into the kiln with no striking. It's very similar in colour to the struck Lemon Drops (see previous post.)

 From the left, we have self-coloured, over clear (interesting - again, more intense colour - like the lemon drops. Must be something to do with the additional heating it takes to melt the encasing layer smooth.), and over white.

The layer over white is really nice - nice poppy orange - I meant "poppy" as in colours that "pop" - but now that I think of it - it is very like those bright orange California poppies that grow by the side of the road.


And these, wildly textured beads, (left two are Macaw over clear, right two are Clear over Macaw) - range from orange to red, depending on how much heating and cooling they got. If you wanted some variability and were going for a fire-opal look - I think this is worth playing with. I see no signs of browning or liveriness, and I don't see it going cloudy either, although, this is hardly a fair test of that.

 

This is a less saturated colour than the transparent reds that we have seen from CiM recently - and seems to have the potential to range from orange to red. I think it has a lot of promise and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more.

CiM 303: Lemon Drops Ltd Run

 CiM 303 - Lemon Drops - a transparent yellow - not as intense as Effetre's Electric Yellow, but also appears to not be inclined to develop a "cloudy" or milky appearance.

 It's more of a golden yellow.











From the left (picture below), we have a self coloured spacer, Lemon Drops over clear (interesting that the colour is more even!), over white (cracked - probably due to my striking and cooling and striking and cooling, etc.), and the end bead on the far right is unstruck - just made it and kilned it. 

As you can see, multiple cooling and heating cycles will turn this glass orange, in varying degrees. They are showing a little redder on this monitor - the deep orange on 3rd from the left is less intense in real life- like orange crush mixed with ginger ale.

 The rods, as you often see with striking colours, has a "thread" of colour down the middle - which can help you identify it when you have lots of random transparents laying around on the bench.

 And here - where I just went ahead and used the glass to make a Wave bead, it was very nicely behaved. I made no effort to strike it. This particular shape is worked fairly cool as well.

I wonder what it looks like over silver foil? Hmmm.

Double Helix Opaque Speckled Luster - OP-509

 Another Speckled Lustre from Double Helix - due to be released on their website today, along with the other test batches from the gathering. This is OP-509 - and like the 507 - the glass rods have a texture that you can feel. It's not unpleasant - not scratchy - just a very definite texture.


 

This first bead is a core of clear (I often put these expensive glasses over a base of something inexpensive to make them go further), encased with 509, and kilned. No striking or reducing at all. It went into the kiln a creamy colour with streaks of brown, and struck in the kiln to a deep chestnut brown - which looks blackish here - and in life - it is pretty dark.

Next up - both with a clear core and encased with 509, and struck. When struck - they were a glorious golden orange - but in the kiln - they have continued to strike to a deep topaz colour, and also develop a wonder metallic lustre.

Again - clear core - encased 509, cooled, and reduced. They were both glorious going into the kiln - rich golden orange and metallicy. They got quite a bit darker in the kiln - I think that they are over clear helps - as this glass is transparent - so you get light coming through from both sides.

Now this bead is a clear core, encased 509, reduced, BUT it was reduced WHILE IT WAS STILL GLOWING.

Notice the opacity? That's what we call "muddy." Reducing a bead that is still glowing gives you different results to reducing a bead that has been allowed to cool to the point of not glowing any more (hold the bead under the table so that you can check if all the glow has gone out of the glass.)

It's still a pretty cool bead.

This bead is: clear core, encased 509, struck, reduced on the left end of the bead, and then the whole thing encased in clear.  Remember - there are just two glasses in this bead - and one of them is clear.

And for this final bead - clear core, encase 509 - pretty thin layer - some Rubino Goldstone stringer, shape and mash it, stamp it with a brass spiral stamp, let it cool, reduce it, encase it - using a big gather to cover the entire spiral stamped area at once, then the same for the other side, and fill in the encasing around it, and shape.

Yummy.

Double Helix Speckled Lusters: OP-507

 Woohoo - another brand new colour to try out! This is a specked lustre from Double Helix - listed in their brochure as OP-507, and available from them as of Aug 18. This batch is labeled "7.12.12"

This glass has a texture to the rod - those whitish speckles you can see in the photo - you can actually feel - like glassy concrete.











This first bead is unstruck and unreduced and un-everything. I wanted to see if the speckles stayed - and I really didn't expect them too - but yes - you can see a sort of starry night effect. This is a self-coloured bead - just wound it and kilned it. 

 For this bead, I made a core of clear, and encased with 507. I tried striking (cooling and reheating) - with no response, so I then reduced it. I over reduced it, and it went rather muddy, so I unreduced it, and re-reduced it, with better results.

 For this one, I made a base of clear, encased it with 507, marvered it, and let it cool to not glowing, and then gently reduced it. This photo does not begin to show how amazingly reflective this bead is - it is oil-slick colours and mirror-bright. A very, very dramatic lustre effect. I'll try re-shooting it once I have it off the mandrel and cleaned.

 This is, again, a clear core, encased with 507 - some of with was applied in a slight reducing flame. It was reduced, and encased with clear - making an effort not to un-reduce it when encasing (keep it out of the flame, much like encasing silver foil.) Finally - fine silver wire was wrapped around the bead and melted in - to form the silver dots.

 This was the same technique again. Clear core, 507, reduce, encase, silver wire.

Pretty nice, eh? Definitely loving this one - wonder what they are going to call it?

Double Helix Okeanos - Preview

 Double Helix - Okeanos - slated for release in September - but a preview batch went to the Gathering - which is how I got it!

Their brochure describes it as a "Blue Fast Striking Terra pulled by machine."

The rods are a dark, opaque Connecticut blue (bottom right in pic.)

This is a striking glass - so get it hot, let it cook, and reheat it.





My first attempts were somewhat less than thrilling.

This one was deliberately not struck - just to see what I got.

 I struck this one a couple of times, and while it had lovely colour when it went into the kiln, and there is colour there, you need a blinding amount of light to see it.

 

 This is the same bead - grossly over-exposed, but you can see that there IS colour there.

 This one I heated to very hot, it was blue when I made it, as it cooled to not glowing - it looked green. I struck it lightly - it showed blues and purples, and I kilned it - and this is what I got.

 This poor bead never had a chance - this is what the bead looks like when you wing it into the kiln unstruck because the smoke detector has started to scream. No fire - just high humidity, btw.

Enough with the spacers - onto some real beads. This is a clear base, layer of Okeanos, marvered, and firepolished. No particular effort to strike it was made - it just struck by the process of being worked. Much better. Marvering helps to cool it too.

 

You can even see a  hint of purples in it. 

And - now we're talking! This was a base of clear, a layer of Okeanos, and encased in clear.

Frequently, I find that glass that I have trouble striking - I think it's a patience thing - behave much better when I encase them. The heat of the encasing layer does the work for me. 

Again - clear core, Okeanos, encased in clear, dots of Okeanos, and reduced. Lovely blues and aquas under that deep, deep encasing, and the dots have reduced, and fumed the clear for an antiquey look.

 This is a clear core, layer of Okeanos, mased, and struck. It had quite a bit of the brown colour when I kilned it. It's pretty dark.

 And this was a lovely looking planet - blues and greens and brown swirls - but out of the kiln - a little dark for my taste.

 This colour really shines when it is encased - beautiful blues and greens. I'd say, at this point, if I can still see browns on it when it is ready to go into the kiln - I'm not going to be really happy with the end result. It should look lighter than the end result I'm going for. With that in mind - I'll try it some more and see if the hypothesis holds up!