CiM 420 Fiddlehead

CiM Fiddlehead - which I don't see at this writing on their page of green, but may well be listed by the time you read this.

Without doing a head to head comparison - this looks very much like Effetre's classic Pea Green.

On the mandrel, on the left, you will see that bead has ivory dots, and there has been a nice reaction with the ivory and the Fiddlehead. 

 Pleasantly streaky and green - a nice, useful, opaque green.

Leafy Eye Candy

Just some swirly, leafy eye candy.

Don't forget, you can mix those ends of rods together. Stick one on another like you were starting a twistie or a filigrana, then get it really hot and mush it together. Then use the gather to make a bead or whathaveyou. Just don't expect the same results twice.  ;-)

Turquoise vs Turquoise

There you go - the holy grail of turquoise - one that doesn't develop that grey metallic lustre. It does lighten a little with heating / cooling cycles.

What is the turquoise on the left? ... I *think* it is from an old stash of Laucha - purchased from Glass Daddy, years ago.While I don't see it there now, I do notice that the site has had a full re-vamp and has entered the age of ecommerce.

While there - I do want to you look at image 6 in the gallery.

There - that is how your glass rods are made. Two guys and a really long space. One of them backs up. If he runs too fast - your rods are thinner. That is why some rods are thicker than others and glass is sold by weight.

Remember that next time you are unhappy with the thickness of a rod of glass.

Anyway - I'm glad to see Glass Daddy back up and alive. I hope they do well!

CiM 116 Mahogany

CiM classifies this colour in with their "reds", but this is a brown, if every I saw one. And a lovely, swirly milk chocolate it is too.

But the best part of this glass is how it develops a rainbow of shades when abused with rapid heating and cooling.

 Look at that! Isn't that yummy? Orange and yellow tones pop up - making this a versatile "autumn leaf" colour.

I definitely want to play with this some more. 

Comparison: CiM Chai vs CiM Primrose

On the top - CiM Primrose, and on the bottom CiM Chai.

The Chai is an earthier colour, and you could call both of them "skin tones" but the Primrose is more suitable for cherubs and whimsical children, and the Chai is more "real."

Although I don't think they are particularly equivalent - I like the Chai better.

CiM 765 Chai

Not a new colour, I reviewed it last in 2008. CiM lists it in with their browns, and certainly - some people are getting a much darker colour with it than I am.

While the rod is a little darker than the last time around, the beads came out pretty similar. '

The leaf - which is cooled rapidly by mashing and then reheated along the edges, has some much more interesting colour variations.  Some interesting possibilities there.

CiM 902 Primrose

CiM Primrose is all kinds of yummy pink-sugar goodness. What a pretty, useful, opaque pink - for those, of course, who like pink.

I did find it a little shocky -  but for a pretty, opaque, pale pink - this is an excellent choice.

CiM 903 Whisper

CiM Whisper is a translucent, moonstone-type glass, that sucks up the light. (Not to be confused with Effetre's Whisper.)

Held up right under a light, it is a pleasant enough warmish light ... non-descript colour. I don't know - paleish pink.

But mostly it just looks scorched to me. Maybe I actually did scorch it. This might be your cup of tea, but sadly - not mine. Oh well - can't like 'em all.

CiM 617 Trapeze

CiM Trapeze is a wonderfully transparent medium lavender - that I get the feeling is supposed to colour shift. It has that colour about it that looks like others that shift, and I see a little tonal variation, but not huge, dramatic shifts. This may say more about my lighting options and the lack of sunlight than about the glass, however.

Like others of it's ilk - other purple-blue "Alexandrite" colour shift glasses - it is dreamy to work. Very clear, tiny bubbles, but no scumming. I wish "clear" was this nice.

 I wandered around the house, looking for different lights to shoot with. You can see a difference between the above and below, but it's hard to say how much of the colour change is a shift, or is a result of the colour of the light.

Anyhoo - it's a nice, magical colour.

Cabochon

Hey now - I really like this one. Off mandrel cabochon.

I really like the way this came out. Almost like a poppy. Woohoo!

CiM 114 Hearthrob

And here is yet another "c'mon baby light my fire" red from CiM.

Think Valentine's day for this one, and a super-bright red it is.

Again - it is slightly streaky and transparent in places - although where is has gone opaque, it is really quite opaque. 

 Again, it stays pretty true to the unworked rod colour.

 And again, while this photographs better than the last two reds (Cinnamon Jelly and Poppy) - this is the same degree of colour correction, for comparison.

CiM 117 Cinnamon Jelly

Another red from CiM - this is Cinnamon Jelly. This is another, super bright intense red.


The unworked rod, to my eye, in artificial light, has a slightly livery, brownish tone, but that appears to disappear when worked.

Like some other transparent reds, it strikes to a cloudy red when repeated heated and cooled. You can see here that the barrel or tube bead on the right side, on the mandrel, is quite transparent at the end, where I finished it and then kilned it, without the repeated cooling and heating cycles of the other beads. 

 Again, the above photo seems orangish to me, and this is the color corrected version that more closely matches the actual colour that I see as I sit here and type this.

 Here's a squiggly little buggly-boo, and you can see the translucent/transparent thing going on.

 Pretty juicy, eh?

But wait - there's still more hot red to come!

CiM 115 Poppy

Continuing with the theme of fiery colours - this is Creation is Messy's Poppy.

This is a super-intense red that appears to be translucent, but is going to read as an opaque in most uses.

The colour stays true to the  coloiur of the unworked rod.

 Reds, especially very intense reds, can be very hard to faithfully photograph. Above is the un-retouched photo, but below, I have darken this image and shifted it a little to the blue end, and come up with red that, on my monitor anyway, more accurately reflect the colour of the glass - it being a very pure red, and not at all as orange as the image above looks to me.

A very nice, vibrant red - but wait - there is more coming!

Comparison CiM Hearthrob, Cinnamon Jelly, and Poppy

So in a head-to-head comparison of these three newest reds - which wins?

Well - when it comes to colour - we all win, but here they are, side by side.

From the front, we have CiM 114 Hearthrob, in the  centre, CiM 117 Cinnamon Jelly, and at the rear of the photo, CiM 115 Poppy.

Despite being very similar,  the Hearthrob is the winner in terms of beautiful, drop-dead red. It may, in fact, be a little on the blue side - more raspberry than strawberry, but for my money - it is the red that I want things to be when I say red.

The Cinnamon Jelly, however, is very, very close, and it's quite possible that if you made a bunch of beads with one or the other, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart.

Under these circumstances, the Poppy looks a little on the orangey side, but it mostly a matter of comparison. Examined by itself, and the Poppy looks like the intense flaming red it is named for.

Again, just for comparison's sake - this is a colour corrected image. You can see the slightly more orangey aspect of the Poppy, but it really is a red.

Choose any one of these if you want a bright red, although Hearthrob would be my favourite.

Except Poppy, with it's translucency, does seem to almost glow ... .

Comparison: Eff Dark Zucca vs CiM Tiger Lily

For ease of comparison, here is Effetre's Dark Zucca (foreground) shown with CiMs Tiger Lily.

The finished beads are virtually identical, but the unworked rods are quite distinct. Both seem to have a slight transparency in areas that have not been heated and cooled multiple times, which adds to the juiciness of the colour.

Barring unforseen reactions - I'd say these two colours can substitute for each other.

CiM 212 Tiger Lily

For contrast with Effetre's Dark Zucca - CiM's new Tiger Lily is almost the exact same colour, but the colour of the unworked rod is much truer to the end result - making this glass more "WYSIWYG."

Again - it is a super juicy intense orange that orange-lovers will love. 

Effetre 426 Dark Zucca

Effetre's new Dark Zucca is a dark orange that gets, like most of Effetre's yellow/orange/red palette, gets darker when worked.

The colour itself is juicy orange with dark orange overtones, quite a bit darker than the unworked rod. 

If you love orange - you will swoon over this. As with other Effetre oranges, I suggest stocking up, as their "hot" palette of colours has significant variability from batch to batch, and there is much wandering the aisle of glass shoppes, with tiny stubbs of rod ends, wailing and gnashing of teeth - "It's different now ... I loved that colour ... ."

Dragon Eye Cabochons - Frit

I use twisties a lot for the iris pattern of my Dragoneyes - but frit works just as well. I was taking a little trip through the packages of GOK frit that I have accumulated over the years. (GOK = God Only Knows.) When you first start lampworking - you tend to buy frits, not realizing how long they are going to last you. Years later - you still have them.

Knowing a bit more than I did when I acquired them, I even got some better results than in the past.

This was "Iris Blue Transparent" - an  104 COE frit with a product code of 346145-1 - over a base of ivory.

 This was another 104 frit called "Copper Ruby," on ivory, with a product code of 346015-1.

 This pair of very lizardy eyes are a Kugler frit - K-215 "Gold Brown" in size 00. I really like this finer grain of frit. Again, on ivory.

The top one is "Magic" (not Dark Magic) - on ivory, reduced and then unreduced, because I didn't like it. It went surprisingly pale under the encasing. The bottom two are Kugler Iris Gold (K-218) - size #1 - quite a bit larger than the #00.

All of these were labeled as reducing frits, but I didn't reduce them (except the one I then unreduced.) They were all layered over ivory, which has mostly reacted strongly with them to create interesting colours and to turn the ivory between the frit chunks a dark grey - almost black.

I particularly like the Kugler Gold Brown ones - not because they are a "pretty" colour (the Iris Blue Transparent was prettier) but because they are almost creepily convincing.

And when it comes to rendering dragon body parts - pretty doesn't really fit the mandate. ;-)

Effetre 724 Buffy

You have to try this, I was told.

The packet of glass was labelled "Buffy."

I have a dog named Buffy, you see. Although she is not this colour. She is mostly inky black with a sprinkling of sand in her fur and tan points.

However, the name was amusing.  ;-)




When working it - it appears to get a layer of transparent topaz on the top. 

 In a spacer bead - this cools to a variable streakiness.

 It appears to react nicely with silver - this has some trails of some random dark high silver glass on it - you can see the reaction at the sides of the marks, but I noticed someone else trying it with silver wire and getting a nice reaction - so definitely experiment with that.

It's variability serves it well in rapid cooling situations, i.e. in brass presses and molds, see the three faces in the top left. 

Oh, and because you asked - this is the real Buffy.