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.