Test Results :: Sapphire

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - Over Clear, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf, 5 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 6 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 7 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 8 - w/ Silver Glass Frit stringer (encased), 9 - w/ Tuxedo, 10 - w/ Copper Green, 11 - w/ Opal Yellow, 12 - w/ Ivory, 13 - w/ Peace

CiM Sapphire is much darker once it's in a bead than it is in the rod.  This is Sapphire's first trick -- as you will see, it's a fairly tricky colour.  It's a joy to work with though -- I was expecting Sapphire to be a boily colour, since Leaky Pen boils and so do a lot of the Effetre blues.  Not so with Sapphire.  I found that as long as I didn't park Sapphire in the flame that I got very little bubbling or scumming, and most of the scumming that did appear was not visible in the bead after annealing even though I could have sworn the same beads looked like hell going into the kiln.

Sapphire is a dark blue, slightly on the grey side, which makes it less vibrant than Effetre Ink Blue or Effetre Intense Blue.  Over clear, it is still fairly dark -- somewhat deeper in colour than Effetre Medium Blue.

Putting silver on top of Sapphire makes it even darker.  The bead on the left here looks almost black, with smudges and sprays of silver wandering over its surface. When this combination is reduced and encased, the Sapphire lightens back up so that you can see through it again and the silver takes on all kinds of attractive blue colour.  Pretty.

Sapphire is a brilliant base for silver glass, but doesn't do that fun thing with silver glass frit stringer that I was hoping for. My TerraNova2 frit looks awesome on top of Sapphire, and so does the reduced silver glass frit.

This one made me do a double-take. Why does Sapphire look like an orangey-brown colour on top of Copper Green? This is one of the weirdest things I've seen in a while.

Where I used Sapphire on top of Copper Green, in addition to the odd colour that the Sapphire turns, something funny also happens underneath. The Copper Green does not get its metallic patina, and separates into two different colours of turquoise.  On top of Sapphire, the Copper Green develops a turquoise outline and then the insides of the dots and stringer lines look faintly pinkish.

On top of Opal Yellow, Sapphire looks sort of purple, and the Opal Yellow doesn't seem to like being underneath it because it's gone all smeary and developed some pinkish fissures.  On top of Sapphire, Opal Yellow seems to lose its yellowness and take on some of the blue from the Sapphire.

On top of Ivory, Sapphire looks faintly greyish, with a purply colour being visible at the edges of the Sapphire lines and dots. On top of Sapphire, the Ivory thins out a little at the edges, but not that noticeably.

On top of Sapphire, Peace separates and looks sort of three-dimensional.  You can barely see the Sapphire on top of the Peace in the picture above because of my terrible photography, but there isn't much to report on there in terms of reactions, so it doesn't matter all that much.

I was sure that I made some fun beads with Sapphire, but now I can't figure out definitively which ones they might have been, so nothing to see here!  There are some great examples of beads that other people have made with Sapphire on the CiM Sapphire page.