Riley Dichro

BTW - you may be asking yourself - what is this Riley Dichro she is using?

This is dichroic glass from Riley Designs - and these days - it is my favourite dichro. Not all dichro is created equal - because - just think about this for a second. Is it the dichro you are having trouble with ... or the glass that it is mounted on? Because if you are paying for a top-quality clear because you hate the look of a cheap, scummy clear - then why would you buy a dichro layered onto a cheap, scummy clear?

Hmmm?

Anyway - this Crinkle dichro is the bee's knees.

Here we have the bead, (as seen in the previous post. Transparent blue core, dichro, clear.)

Here is the dichro itself - Pink Teal Crinkle. Pink refers to it's transmission colour (backlit - light passing through it), Teal to the reflection colour (although Orange / Cyan would be more descriptive in this case), and Crinkle is the texture. This particular heavy coating, with a very large texture, breaks up into large pieces in the bead - for a very dramatic effect.

Anyway - just so you know. 

One more shot of the same piece of glass. For those of you who may have stumbled across this site and do not know about dichroic glass or are just new to lampworking - these 3 pictures are of the same piece of glass. Dichroic: di meaning "two" and chroic - colour. The glass has a coating that reflects one wave length of colour and transmits another - giving it two opposite colours, depending on how you look at it. 

And here we have another bead - my classic wave bead, also made completely from dichro. Yum. This one is made with Green / Magenta.

Notice how the colours fall on the opposite sides of a colour wheel? Just borrowing a screen shot here of the colour wheel in Painter to help you visualize it. Green / Magenta. Orange / Cyan. Complementary colours.

CiM 819 Experimental

This looked like a clear to me, and when I check the CiM website, lo and behold, it is a clear - so well done me for figuring that out. (Unlike the time I tried everything I knew to coax colour out of Double Helix Aether ... )


And insofar as I can tell from a single rod - it seemed pretty nice. No obvious scumming or hugely awful defects.

 

It played well with the dichro.  

This is a core of random transparent blue, dichro (Riley - Pink/Teal Crinkle), and encased in Experimental. 

Hope they keep the name - I kind of like the idea of a permanently experimental colour.

I'll have to be trying a couple of pounds of this before I pass judgement - but given that we are all looking for that perfect clear - so far, it looks promising.

CiM 821 Ecru

I was pretty excited to try this colour - because a translucent ivory? What's not to love about that? CiM calls it "an off-white opal" and cautions to work it cool to prevent it shifting to a golden colour.

Top bead - tab with intense black decoration (more on that in a sec.) Next mandrel - two self-coloured spacers that do, indeed look rather golden, and one with dark sky-blue dots. Notice the total absence of the gray lines characteristic of ivory + turquoise.

Here they are backlit. Now the square tab looks a little golden here, but not as much as the spacers. And let me tell you - I cooked the snot out of this baby. Someone observed that the intense black that we are getting these days doesn't "web" the way the old stuff did. I remember the alabastro beads and the super heating and the intense black and the webbing - and as this glass reminded me of the old Effetre Ivory Alabastro (a glass that is so damn shocky as to be unusable - last time I tried it) - I thought I would re-create that technique. And yeah - I would say - that ain't Intense black as I know it. For one thing, you can see the freakin' purple where it is thin. It's interesting enough - but not at all what I was expecting.

Anyway - I'm not sure that it is the heat that makes the colour shift so much as repeated applications of low-amounts of heat - the kind you use when making multiple beads on a mandrel to stop them cracking and falling off.

 And one final observation - only a little boundary reaction with the turquoise (almost greenish), but the turquoise did do a lovely job of pooling or separating. Nice, eh. I think putting those dots closer next time and letting them touch might look cool.

CiM 539 Jet Stream

See - this looked like denim-y kind of colour when I was at the torch (must have been the glasses) - but it is clearly a sapphire blue. CiM says that this has been engineered to be the same colour as sapphire, without the colour shift that some people reported having.

 Anyway you slice it - it is a stunning shade of blue.

Two self-coloured spacers and one over white.








Here - same beads - backlit.

And backlit with a dark background.

Hmmm - looks like I put them in the kiln too hot and they unbalanced a little. Oh well.

Super pretty blue, dark enough to have impact, without being so dark you have to get crazy to see the colour.

CiM 538 Slate

CiM Slate - a transparent grey. CiM calls it a blue-grey, and I am personally having trouble deciding if I think it is a blue-grey, or a grey-blue.

It has come up distinctly blue-ish in the photos, but in real life, it seems very subject to the lighting, and really seems more like a grey, that is a little blue. Except when you put it near something green. In which case - a little greenish.

This photo seems like the best representation of the colours I see in real life. The beads are two self-coloured spacers on the left and right, and over white in the middle.

Strongly backlit. 

And with a pure white background - looking more blue.

So this is one of those tricky colours that is going to be strongly influenced by the colours around it.

One of the things I thought was interesting was that the Effetre transparent greys look very purple when then are hot, and this glass did not do that - for whatever that is worth.

CiM 624: African Violet

I was pretty excited about this one when I was working it. CiM African Violet. After all - a good purple is hard to find, and especially not in the red-purple family.

It came out of the kiln a little less saturated than I expected it to be - a little grayer in hue, but that might be just the layering.


 From the left - self coloured - too dark to read as anything other than black; over white, and the final bead is a core of clear, thin layer of African Violet, Riley Dichro Pink Teal Crinkle, and finally a layer of clear.

Same beads again - backlit this time. The bead over white looks a little sooty - that might be why it doesn't look as saturated as I wanted it to look. Working it over clear might be the way to go. 

Anyway - the world needs more purple glass and this is a lover-ly purple. Get thee out there and be violet!