Test Results :: Olive (Lauscha)

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Blend (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ White

General Impressions
Lauscha Olive looks almost black when it's hot. It is also a very stiff, very dense colour. It is a pleasure to use in stringer form because of its stiffness.

This colour is also very reactive, and does crazy things with other colours. I have not done my tests yet for CiM Olive (This is a thankless, endless job I've set myself! Someday I'll get to it) but I don't think the two colours, apart from both being a similar olive-y shade of green, have much in common. I don't expect CiM Olive to do the same kinds of weird, spready reactive things that this Lauscha Olive does, but I'm sure that it has compelling secrets of its own for me to discover.

My Lauscha Olive rods are pretty thick - possibly around 9mm in diameter. The glass is surprisingly not-shocky for its girth, which was also my experience with Lauscha Cocoa. After you've melted some of the rod and you reintroduce it to the flame you're likely to lose the tip of it, but apart from that it's smooth sailing with this colour.

Reactions

One of the things I'm discovering is that a lot of the colours that are full of endless organic fun do this blue thing with silver that you see in the bead on the right. On top of Olive, silver leaf melted in sort of disappears and forms some blue-ish blotches. Once the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a shiny armour-like patina over the Olive with a fumed blue haze around it.  Awesome.

The reactions with silver are NOT one of the ways Lasucha Olive and Lauscha Cocoa are similar. Olive is WAY nicer with silver and striking silver glass than Cocoa is.

I got better colour out of my TerraNova2 frit on top of Olive than I have with almost any other colour. Lauscha Olive is much nicer with the striking silver glass frit here than with the reduction frit blend.

Lauscha Olive is odd with Tuxedo only in that almost every other green that I have tried with Tuxedo has stirred Tuxedo into a crazy, webbing frenzy. With Olive, Tuxedo is simply a nice, crisp Black. The only strange thing I see in this bead is that where the Tuxedo and Olive portions of the bead met in the middle, the Olive is a bit lighter.

Whoah. I thought that Lauscha Cocoa was cool with Copper Green, but as cool as that reaction was, this one blows it away. On top of Olive, Copper Green develops a light outline, and then a silvery inner outline with a concentration of a darker teal colour in the centre.  Three rings for the price of one :)

On top of Copper Green, Lauscha Olive seems to spread a little and take on a faint translucency, and a light turquoise watercolour outline surrounds the Olive dots and lines.

On top of Opal Yellow, Lauscha Olive loses its vibrancy, and it does weird things to the Opal Yellow underneath it. The Opal Yellow on the right side of this bead almost seems to have a crack in it, but that's just a transparent crease formed by this reaction.

On the left side of this bead, the Opal Yellow dots and lines have developed a light yellow outline and the inside of them has blushed a pinkish orange colour. Another really cool reaction here.

On top of Lauscha Olive, Ivory develops a fine, translucent line in the middle of its dots and lines. On top of Ivory, Lauscha Olive loses its cohesion a little and bleeds. This reaction is pretty similar to what happened with Lauscha Cocoa and Ivory, although Cocoa is a little better at it than Olive is.

And finally, White separates a little on top of Lauscha Olive (but not as much as Ivory does) and Olive spreads on top of White (but not as much as on top of Ivory).

Fun beads with Olive: