Kronos, Triton, Clio

Double helix. Gotta love it. NTSCT - Never the same colour twice.

Krono - reduces - appears to be a transparent cobalt.  Here it is on black, reduced, and encased.

This leaf is not encased. 

Triton - looks black, when held to the light, you can see it is cobalt blue. Reduced and encased. Pearlescent effect when encased. 

These Mermaid tails are also Triton, just reduced, no encasing. Pretty darn impressive.

And Clio - the carnival of glass - reduced and struck.

Brass Wire Makes Bubbles

 So I heard about this thing where if you put brass wire in the bead and encase it  - you get bubbles.

So, I figured I'd try that. I had to dig around to find uncoated brass wire - because a lot of the craft and jewelry wire has nylon coating to prevent tarnishing. That may create bubbles, but would also probably create soot and noxious smells, so let's just avoid that, shall we?

This cabochon is Aurae, with a spiral of brass, and encased. How this manages to be Aurae is beyond me, but that's what my notes say.

And bubble it does. Can't say that I love it, but it does do it.

This cabochon has a layer of silver, and then a twisted, spiraled and flattened piece of brass wire, that created a pocket of bubbles at the side.

Weirdly, it appears to have a finger print in the glass, but I assure you, I did not touch the glass with my fingers. Perhaps I got a fingerprint on the silver foil and it got retained under the glass when the silver was melted off? What an episode of CSI that would make, eh?

Here's the big side bubbles. Not so attractive. 

I've seen some really awesome beads done with this technique, with the brass wire inclusions, and they are either better at it, or cleverer photographers than I am - both of which are possible.

I should maybe go back and try that Aurae again. I'm really not sure that I believe my own notes. ;-)

CiM 720 Autumn

It's a brown streak, or a streak of brown colours. Here we have CiM 720 - Autumn. I found Autumn to be a bit shocky - and other testers agree.

(The leaf shape on the wire does have streaks of some other colour on top - but I apparently did not record what they were. )

Like CiM Moccasin, it comes out a little lighter than the rod, and you can see from this  close-up that the end of the rod is ragged and striated where it has shocked off.





















 It's a pretty, peachy brown, from the left - two self-coloured spacers, and on the right, Ivory dots and Autumn dots on top, and it has bled like crazy. So not so desirable for super precision work, but yummy for organic blendy styles. A twisty of ivory and autumn would be fun.

CiM 719 Moccasin

Seems to me that I got lighter, gingerier results than the other testers of CiM Moccasin did. It came out palers than the rod, and is just a nice, well-behaved light tan colour. Suitable for organics and animals. Not terribly exciting in the quest for the perfect purple, red, pink, blue, or whatever your particular passion is.


But we need those solid, hard-working every day colours in order to make the other colours pop!



This is two self-coloured spacers, and one with black dots (and a white marker bead.)

Same two again. Pretty,. nice shine. Like I said - well behaved. Useful.

Shine-On Glow-in-the-Dark Glass 104 COE

I got my hands on some of the new Shine-on Glow in the Dark glass - 104 CoE from Brent Graber. I have tried glow in the dark powder in the past, and it has been something of a challenge to use, as the glass didn't stick to it, and you had to roll the bead in the powder and then encase like mad all over it to make sure that it stayed there - much like working with mica powder. Unsatisfying as a way to work, although the glow results were good. Still - kind of a one-trick pony - especially as I'm not really about making beads that need to glow in the dark.

But everything old is new again, and apparently glowing-in-the-dark is a hot trend again. Toho, a Japanese seedbead manufacturer has just launched a line of glowing beads in different colours, and different glows, with big splashy ads promoting, of all things, beaded, glowing wedding gowns. Because when the lights go down, the party starts. Or something like that.

So what is this new Shine-On glass like?

Well - it really does glow.  These are the handful of beads,

And these are the beads in the dark. For the technically inclined,  this is a 10 second exposure at ISO 800, f 7.1. In pretty much complete darkness.

They glow like crazy.

Now for the bad news. The glass is as shocky as hell. You pretty much have to pre-warm it in or on the kiln. And once you work down through the warmed part - it goes back to shocking like crazy.

But - it does come as a frit, and while the frit does actually shock - you roll the bead in the frit and listen to it snap, crackle and pop - it doesn't really matter so much.

I didn't have any problems with it with regard to heat and burning out, you can encase it or not. I'm told that some colours are not so good for encasing because they will block the specific wavelengths that "charge" the glass, and if you encase it with something too dark - same story - the glass won't charge and glow.

It is a significant improvement over the old glow powders - and because you don't really work it the same as you would other colours - you wouldn't want to get a gather and build a base bead with it, I think that the shockiness is something you can live with. It certainly is manageable with pre-heating - unlike some air-laden glass that it doesn't matter what you do - it still shocks.

It comes in a variety of pale colours, and apparently they don't all glow the same, although I was mixing the frits for these beads, so I can't say which was which. The rods themselves have a grainy texture, so you won't get them mixed up with the other stuff. These beads are mostly a core of clear and med aqua, rolled in frit and encased.

It's easy enough to work, has a really strong glow, and I would say, if you are looking for make glow in the dark beads, this is an excellent solution.

And if you want to stand out at a rave or at a nightclub, or just at cosmic bowling - anywhere that has the "black" or UV lighting - these will freaking knock your socks off. Because they are bright. Like wearing the full moon. Blue moon.

Totally trippy, Dude.

(I currently only see the 90CoE on the site - but it must be somewhere. If all else fails, call Jean at Nortel and she will track it down for you.)

CiM 433 Limelight

CiM Limelight is a very, very pale transparent green, very pale and ethereal. A very fresh green, and light enough to encase with. I'd like to try it over silver foil.















Three self coloured spacers.

And a large barrel shaped hollow. It really should have been more hollow than this - but it's still got an air bubble. 

CiM's site leads me to think that it would etch well too.

Note keeping

Really - this blog is about keeping notes for my sake. You get to benefit too. As a great author once said - the reason people write reference books is so that they know where to look stuff up.

I'm behind on posting, but when I can get a few minutes - I can try and catch up.

But how, you ask, do I remember what I did?


Well - here's the secret. I have a notebook at that torch. I make notes after the bead.

I put a coloured marker on the mandrel - so I can confirm positively which bead goes with which notes. Especially critical when the colours are very similar or strike or otherwise look different.

The next day - when the beads come out of the kiln - I shoot a picture of the page with the notes in the notebook and then pictures of the beads. That's why most of my beads are shot on the mandrels, instead of being all cleaned up.

One of the awesome things about digital photography is that it makes it easy to take photographs as a way of recording things you need to remember. So while I have the notebook and the notes, but taking a picture, when I look at the photos - I have the photo of the page from the notebook to remind me. 


So even weeks later, I can figure out what I was doing. 

Simple, really - when you have a process.

Cheers!

BTW - I do this "photo as reminder" all the time. Photos of the scoreboard. Photos of the catalogue. Photos of a business card or a brochure or a bill or a magazine ad or an empty container to remember to buy more whatever. Instruction manual pages.  My phone is full of photos of serial numbers on equipment. ;-)

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!