Effetre 232 - Light Turquoise

I love turquoise - turquoise and ivory, black and clear - my four most used colours. So imagine my surprise when the latest batch of Light Turquoise comes in looking - well - Celadon-ish.

I mean, it's a cool colour and everthing, but whoa, dude, not so Light Turquoise.

However, in practice, it's not so very different. It does seem to be more inclined to haze up with the gray haze (soak in CLR to remove).

From the left, two self-coloured beads, one with ivory dots (very reactive) and a base of new Light Turquoise, with dots of the old batch light turquoise. Colour is pretty similar. But you can see that the primary difference is the grayish overcoat.

This may or may not have a bit impact on you. If you are doing production work with Light Turquoise, I suspect you may want to clarify which batch you are getting before ordering.

CiM 529: Frost

Oh my!

What a delightful colour! And soo nice and clear and yummy.

This is CiM Frost, and it is a lovely pale, icy aqua. It has a quality that makes you inspect it under different lighting conditions - in case it changes colour. ;-)

It works beautifully - oh my I wish clears were this nice, and  is just gorgeous.

It's not just me - all the other testers over on the Creation is Messy site love it too.

 These below are over a thin, thin white core.

And these are self-coloured spacers. 

I'm going to trying sandblasting these - I'll let you know how they turn out.

Ink Blue

Effetre's Ink Blue - nothing new here - just appreciation for what a really lovely colour it is.

Here is it - over white, laid down fairly thin, and melted out thinner. 

What a pretty shade of purple. Who says there is no pretty purple in the Effetre family?

This is what you usually think of - pardon the bead, but it was just to hold the bead release on after it broke. I didn't want the end bead to slide down to my hand. 

But that dark intense blue purple is more versatile than just a transparent. Layer it over white for a luminous, lavender effect.

Frit paddle follow up

Remember that frit paddle/tray that I mentioned? These are the beads ...

OK, it's a crappy photo - taken with my phone, but they turned out rather well. They are variously fire lotus frit on a background of some black, some dark silver plum, and some on ivory.

Maybe the key to frit is keeping it in a flat, even layer.

Won't that be a pisser if I've been doing it wrong all these years?  ;-)

Terranova Inside Out

Check this out! This dragon eye cracked off part of it's eyelid (because I had it rattling around loose in my jewelry baggy when I went to Tucson. )  :-(

But check out the difference between the inside of the glass and the outside!

 The unexposed part of the glass is a deep brick red, and the outside is blues and purples!

Kewel, eh? Almost worth breaking for!

This was one of the Terranova - version 2.something I believe.

CiM 428: It ain't easy being

You might think that a green called "It ain't easy being... " would be a deep, froggy, well, Kermit green. Instead - it is more of an frog underbelly green. It ain't even easy being a green called 'it ain't easy'.

Or maybe I'm leaping to conclusions here. Maybe it's not a reference to Kermit the Frog and the Rainbow Connection - maybe it's just a cry of existential Angst - a recognition that in general ... it ain't easy being ...


CiM 428 is a soft, mint ice cream colour. It is less greyish than CiM 425 Mint Chip, but similar in saturation.






Here we have, from the left, It Ain't Easy Being, self; as a core with ivory dots; and as a core with EDP dots.  Note the nice reactions with the ivory and the EDP.

It also reminded me of Copper Green, so this bead is It Ain't Easy Being on the left, and  Copper Green on the right. There are ivory dots at the ends, and EDP dots in between. You can see that the Copper Green is much more strongly reactive, especially with the EDP. But still - similar sort of reaction.

You can see the ivory dots much better on this side.


It's a soft, pretty green that I think has its uses - will appeal to people who like greens.

Video from Corning ... Glass Masters at Work: Lino Tagliapietra

Here's a cool, short video from Corning of one of the glass masters.

I love how glass turns men into poets that talk about glass as a living thing ...







There's some great stuff on youtube - watch a couple and then see all the suggestions start popping up in your feed. You'll be watching for days!

Frit ... Paddle? Tray? from CG Bead Rollers

 Had some fun with this new tool the other night! This is a frit ... tray? Paddle? Trough? It is an enclosed, shallow graphite tool with a rim, that you put the frit in, and then roll your bead in. It has a handle - so you can pick it up and see the bead as it touches down on the frit.

As you may know, I really like to be able to see the when the tool hits the bead, so to speak, so I really enjoyed making some frit beads with this. And if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I am NOT a big frit person. Me and frit - not so much. However, this tool is pretty cool and it has the nice benefit that when you pick it up, you can give it a little shimmy and flatten the frit out to a nice, even layer.

Maybe that is why it was working well for me? Generally, my approach to frit is to use the tray as seen below, with the frit piled up in a huge drift.

Hmmm. Something to think about.

I will say this though. Without the curved frit tray to pour the frit back into, and then back into the jar, there is no way I could have gotten the frit neatly out of this new paddle doo-hickey. So there's that to think about. It's good to use, but not so good for clean up. Maybe if one corner at the end was carved down to make a funnel gap to pour back into the jar?

Fun New Murrini Tools

While I was in Tucson - I stopped by the new Glass Artists Bead Show - there's a story there, but that's for a different post - anyway - CG Beads was there - the Bead Roller folks, so I stopped in to look.

Now I'm mostly too free-form for bead shaping roller type tools - and while I think they are fine - most of my presses migrated to the BeadFX studio for anyone to use there. However, when I saw these,

 I was ... oh - it's an optic mold. With a handle ... because ... and the gal running the booth finished my sentence - "optic molds get hot."

We actually repeated that about three times, like a mantra. Because - this is effing brilliant.


 You can see here with a little bit more of an angle that there is a handle on the back. Hold the handle, plunge the glass in, and you are in no danger of trying to hold onto the hot mold - which is cool the first time you use it, and burn-inducing every time thereafter.

If you are still scratching your head on what it is, it's for making murrini. Get a blob (gather) of glass hot - plunge it into the hole, it takes on the shape of the hole, you then add colour around the outside, and stretch out into cane, and slice it up into murrini.

 See, nice, easy flower murrini.

















OK - next cool murrini tool - this murrini holder. Stand your murrini slices in the cavities so that they stay upright, don't fly away, roll away, etc.



Plus nice lentil or cabochon cavity up at the end. 

So now you can use the murrini you just made, without half of them flying away as you try to apply them to the bead.


 Another brilliant tool.

So, two great tools for the murrini enthusiasts, or those that might want to be. ;-)

There is, btw, a nice little description of how to use the cross shape mold (above) on the CG Beads page.

Eye Candy

My latest eye. I'm kinda happy with this one - and it has an odd optical illusion to it - it looks sort of distorted - even though the camera was very close to vertical. The just seems to have nailed an artificial perspective effect.

Kool, eh?

Twisted

There is something so very satisfying about a nice twistie - almost seems a shame to use it.


I just got back from Tucson (and boy, are my arms tired. ba-da-boom.) I did get to the new Tucson Glass Artists bead show, and got a couple of treasures.




Also picked up some new tools which I am anxious to try out. I've been insanely busy lately - but trying to get to the torch a bit more! So many projects - so little time!

Next one.

Going to have to think of a better name for this series than "New Directions."

Anyway - here is the latest. Current name is "Careful where you step."

For scale - here it is nestled in my hand.

Testing for Compatibility

I found this video that illustrates the stringer test for compatibility. You can use the Stringer Test to check for compatibility in a suspect glass, or a glass that you have lost the label off.

I've read about the test oodles of times, but it is so much clearer to just watch it.

Why is Glass Transparent?

Glass is cool. Really freaking cool. There is a whole whack of really cool science in our art.

Welcome to the New Year

2015 - I swear, just yesterday - 2015 was far in the unimaginable future - and yet, here it is.

Take a look into this future and see how much of it you think will happen. I know one part of it that will never happen - my house will never be this clean until they invent personal cleaning robots - and let me tell you - the Roomba doesn't begin to cover it!




If the Corning vision of the future of glass doesn't convince you - then check out these two videos of Mythbusters Jamie and Adam exploring Corning's Brave New Glass. Now there's some futuristic stuff! And yay Adam and Jamie - well done you.

Boneyard

The Boneyard. The crash site of a long lost dragon.

The latest in my series of New Directions.

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.