Test Results :: Cocoa

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - w/ SiS, 4 - w/ Silver foil, 5 - w/ Silver foil - reduced & encased, 6 - w/ Khaos frit, 7 - w/ Silver glass frit blend (Nyx, Gaia, Elektra) - reduced, 8 - As a floral, 9 - w/ Tuxedo, 10 - w/ Copper Green, 11 - w/ Ivory

Lauscha Cocoa is a dark, chocolate brown as promised by its name.  It doesn't need any special striking or encouragement to do its thing, and it is wonderfully reactive.  

General Impressions

Even though the Cocoa rods I have are pretty thick (9 mm, I think... super thick) the glass melts like butter and even melted ends don't shock as badly as you might expect.  I was working outside (in FEBRUARY) and I had a little popping from melted ends, but that was the extent of the shockiness I experienced.

Cocoa is a relatively soft colour, and on that imaginary scale in my head where Opal Yellow is 1 and Black is 10, I'd put Cocoa at around a 2 or a 3.  Because this colour is so reactive, much more experimentation will be required before I will feel comfortable that I really 'know' it. Some colours go through these tests and either behave in predictable ways or in ways I feel I can explain, but Cocoa is a strange animal.

When I did my tests for CiM Adamantium, I sat down expecting that colour to behave similarly to Cocoa just because it was also dark brown, and I learned that browns are far less predictable than I'd been lead to expect by some of the other colour groups.

Reduction

Reducing Cocoa all by itself (Bead #2) doesn't have any effect on the colour or surface of the bead.

Reactions

In Bead #3, I put some silvered Ivory stringer on top of the Cocoa and melted it in.  There's a dark line in the middle of the stringer, presumably because all of the silver fled into the middle.  

In the bead with the silver foil just melted in, I got a different result from what I was expecting. (Bead #4) I know I shouldn't have expected it to crust up like with Adamantium (I learned that lesson, right?) but I wasn't expecting it to turn almost blue in places the way it did. Neat! 

And in the bead where I reduced the silver foil and encased it with Clear, I got some interesting pale blue colour as well.  (Bead #5)

In Bead #6, Khaos didn't do what I wanted it to do, but at least it looks sort of interesting.  I got a little colour, and it's gone all feathery. The silver glass colours in the silver glass frit blend (Bead #7) did sort of the same thing, webbing over the surface of the Cocoa. And I got great shine out of the frit, unlike the matte, yucky results I got with Pajama Blue and Aqua recently.

I need to do some more experimentation with Cocoa and silver glass, because I think that really cool things are possible here.

Cocoa makes Copper Green behave oddly. (Bead #10)  Both when the Copper Green is on top of the Cocoa and when the Cocoa is on top of the Copper Green, the Copper Green separates into two versions of itself - a light, chalky turquoise and a dark, vivid turquoise with the lighter colour next to the Cocoa.  Awesome.

I'm pretty interested in how it behaved with Ivory, too. (Bead #11) The Ivory on top of the Cocoa just sinks right in, making the line and dots slimmer than they were when I put them on the bead... and the line stayed nice and crisp, too. Cocoa must be even softer than Ivory, and that's pretty soft.  

On top of Ivory, the Cocoa sort of loses its cohesion.  It seems to feather out into the Ivory, and I can't wait to figure out a way to exploit this. Especially since where there are two bits of Cocoa both behaving this way, where the reactions meet, a fine line of pure Ivory pops up to separate it. Again, awesome.

Here are some other beads made with Cocoa: