For those of you who have stumbled across this blog who do not know anything about glass, you should know that when you see glass in different colors - like on a bead - it starts in different colors. So while the painter might start out with a dozen colors of paint and mixes them into hundreds of hues and thousands of shades - the glass artist has to start with hundreds of colors, and then, with some luck, rely on layering transparents or interesting chemical reactions. One does not simply "mix ones own colors."
However - I needed a transition color - so this is a blend of a transparent yellow Laucha colour that is generally quite tolerant of being worked without developing too much opacity, and the transparent version of the Effetre Kiwi.
I encase the end of the rod of Kiwi with the yellow, for about 2-3 cm - as much as I can without losing control of the kiwi from heating, using around the world encasing. I then make the item - which is why they tend to be simple, because at that point, I'm out of glass. I am pleased that this rather inexact method is giving me fairly consistent results, a nice key-lime green. Which makes a nice transition from the pieces in the yellow to the pieces in the kiwi - so it's not like the color choice was particularly tricky. ;-)
But other than melting the encasing down, I'm not particularly stirring or pushing the colors together - which I have done in the past. Which works, but adds a great deal of time to the process.
Maybe it's not fair to call this blending - it's just encasing, but encasing before you make the piece instead of after. If you were to use this on a bead, it could enable you to make smaller beads in a blended colour, because you could go smaller than two layers of encasing.
Anyway - it's one more tool in the toolbox of choices.
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