Zoozii Presses

Have you looked at the Zoozii website lately? I know I hadn't - I just cruised over there looking up some pricing, and damn - have they ever done a nice job! Nice samples and presentation and pdfs explaining how to use.

 

For all I know, the site was upgraded years ago, but it looks really nice and is easy to use, and very appealing - and those bubble focals look really, really interesting ...  so does the bar knob ... hmmmm. 

Video: CMOG Reticello Platter

Aesthetically speaking - the fine white lines of reticello don't speak to me. But watching the technique of making it is freakin' mind-blowing.

CMOG - the Corning Museum of Glass - has a number of very informative short videos on glass blowing techniques that are well presented and nicely balanced between simplicity and technicality.

That extreme batch of Copper Green

Remember that extreme batch of copper green? How it came out almost completely grey?

Well - this is the same batch, but worked differently. No re-heating - almost like working EDP. Just shape and kiln.

Not completely free of greyness - but quite a bit different, eh?

A Little Eye Candy

Just a little eye candy - some organic pendants I have been working on. Still have quite nailed what I want from them yet - might have to try some transparents next.

Caliente Cane - Cranberry

And from deep in the stash, from a looooong time ago - Caliente glass - pulled rods of - I think furnace glass. I don't know if Caliente is still in business - there is a Caliente Hot Shop - but I don't think there is a connection - links I have found are dead.

Caliente was a 96 COE - so it sits with other incompatible glass in my stash - now that everything I do is one colour at a time, I can haul this stuff out and play with it.

This is a really pretty pink, no livering, very nice. The rods are skinny - stringer size actually. In theory - it should be a little stiffer, as a 96 COE, but I didn't really notice a difference.

I guess, when it's gone, it's gone for good. I seem to have a lot of that stuff now!

Unknown Lauscha Light Mint Green

I have this stash of Lauscha glass with no label - no idea what it is called. I know it is Lauscha because of the size of the rods - my stash all has these big, fat rods.

This is a translucent minty green in the rod, but opacifies in the kiln to an semi-opaque light green. The edges, that would have cooled more, are more opaque.

Extreme Copper Green

Wowsers! Are these ever extreme! I decided to just whack off a bunch, with minimal reheating, just melt, shape and toss in the kiln, under the apparently erroneous assumption that would get me less of the metallic blush. Um, not! In fact, less reheating appears to have resulted in more metallic bloom than less. Interesting!

Effetre 508 Yellow Opalino

Effetre Yellow Opalino - reminded me a bit of CiM Ghee.

The 5xx series numbering tells us that this is from the Effetre Opalinos - colours that have something of a bad rap for being shocky, tricky to work, pricier, and not fond of being encased. In fact - encasing them is a waste - they loose their ethereal quality easily that way. You may even run into compatibility issues with encasing them.

But I have always liked them anyway.

You can see that there is a shift in colour from the rod to the end result.

The end results is more of a maple butter, apricot, antiqued ivory than "yellow."

 Flipped over.

 Here is one next to the melted rod. You can see that the colour change is not apparent in the rod - so that these came out of the kiln as something of a surprise. They went into the kiln as a shaded from translucent almost clear to light yellow. While in the kiln - they took on a very dark aspect - which is what reminded me of CiM Ghee - which, as you may remember, starts translucent pale yellow, and takes on a toasted aspect.

That there are two distinct colour pairs is telling, I think. Two were done at the beginning of the session, and got a much longer turn in the kiln, about two hours more, than the two done at the very end of the session.

So I suspect that longer annealing or garaging makes for deeper colours, but as I didn't record which were done first, I can't say for certain.

I think I like the richer colour of the two deeper coloured ones better. If I can't have ethereal floaty translucent white to yellow, I'd rather have apricot butter.

CiM 333 Unique Sunshine

I've talked about this colour before, so feel free to breeze onto something else. But somehow, this colour keeps popping up for me - maybe because it is so bright.

This is an old batch - CiM no longer uses the designation "unique" for mis-melts and colours that don't match.

It's just an in-your-face bright opaque yellow. Lemons and daffodils and canaries. Yellow.

CiM 437 Primavera and Comparison - Copper Green

CiMs Primavera - I keep thinking of this as Primaverde - which would make it "first green" - n'est pas? Anyway - I looked at this and thought it might be very similar in colour to Effetre Copper Green, but I was wrong. And not wrong. Read on.

 It's a nice, light, opaque, green, pretty, middle of the road, hue-wise.

 Here it is, side-by-side with copper green (on the left). The metallic blush on the copper green gives you the overall appearance of it being more yellow than it is. You can see that where the colour has stayed green, the green is a blueish green, which doesn't match the Primavera (on the right) at all. But the overall impression is quite harmonious - the two greens looking very nice together. Food for thought.

Comparison: CiM Troll, CiM Duck Egg, Effetre Copper Green

Color comparison. Resting in my hand is CiM Troll. Above it to the left is CiM Duck Egg. Above and to the right is Effetre Copper Green - with it's distinctive metallic sheen.

The Troll and the Copper Green are very close in color - the troll is a smidge bluer, I think, but does not have the metallic development. I can't speak to it's other reactive properties.

The three do look good together.

Light

Why, readers of the last few posts might wonder, does she keep whinging about a light. Probably because you didn't see my posts about it on facebook, to whit:

Are compact fluorescents supposed to make a hissing noise and then start smoking?

Literally - smoke started pouring out of the light, and not a puff either, a sustained trail of truly, stunningly, vile-smelling burning electrical fire type smell.

This was not  just any light bulb, but one of the ridiculously expensive color balanced light bulbs, bought from a specialty photography site.

Hmmm. The smell was so awful, I had to put the light out in the garage for a while, even after removing and discarding the bulb. It did clean off, but hoo-boy - it was nasty.

This does demonstrate, however, that "it is all done with smoke and mirrors" - and once you let out the smoke ... it don't work no more. ;-)

Comparison: CiM Troll, Van Dyke, Safari, and Koala

The opaque neutrals/greys from the latest batch from CiM - the rods don't look very inspiring, but the results are far from ordinary.

From the left, 455 Troll, 727 Van Dyke, 726 Safari, and 823 Koala. 

 Again, from the left, 455 Troll, 727 Van Dyke, 726 Safari, and 823 Koala. 

Koala stays true-ist to grey - troll is sageier, and Van Dyke and Safari hove off into uncharted waters with desert colours. Or dessert colours if it is honey and caramel you are after.

CiM 823 Koala

CiM Koala, in the rod, at my torch, looked like a warm brown, but here at my computer - it is more of a blue grey - pretty close to neutral though.

This light is screwing it up, because here it looks warm again. Maybe it is a color shift. (Wanders around house looking at it under various lights. Nah - I just really need to replace that light bulb.)

It was a bit shocky for me - but I did not have that large a sample, so I can't say if it is typical or not. It did look blueish while I was working it.