CiM 211 Orange Crush

Wowsers.

If you crush on orange - then this is your colour! This is CiM Orange Crush, a translucent/ transparent/ opaque striking orange.

Once upon a time, waaaaay back when, when I first started lampworking - I used to love Effetre's striking orange. It came as orange rods, and etched beautifully. I used to make goldfish goddesses with it.  I loved that glass. And then, one day, I bought some and it was different. It was a pale amber rod with a thin thread of colour through the centre, you HAD to strike it, and it wasn't really orange any more. More like red. Actually - a nicer red than Effetre Striking Red.

Sigh.

But now we have ... Orange Crush! Orange you glad?

This glass comes as a semi-opaque in the rod, and if you don't cook it, will stay that way - as in the bead on the left. The bead on the right - I heated to white-hot, and kilned it without striking it. It is much closer to transparent. Fun! These beads are both self-coloured.

However, thinking of those goldfish, all those years ago, I thought it might be fun to try one again. I worked off the end of the mandrel - thinking it could be hung as a pendant with a glue in bail.

It came out  pretty cool, and the tail is nicely flamboyant without the mandrel sticking out of his butt and getting in the way.

Here he is again, strongly backlit. You can see that the body - with lots of re-heating, has struck to translucent, while the fins, that get just enough heat to prevent them cracking, stayed largely transparent. 

 However, when I put him in the kiln, I put him on a rack, instead of flat on the kiln floor. And he bent. He went in flat, but drooped over the bead rack. It's actually a nice fishy wiggle-in-the-water kind of bend - probably better than if I had tried to do it - but as a pendant - that ain't gonna work. So this might be a little softer than most transparents, more like an opaque glass.

However - this is the ultimate happy orange and I'm glad to be able to add it to my palette again. Only took 14 years.