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October 23, 2011

Test Results :: Sunshine

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

Vetrofond Sunshine is a vibrant, pure yellow. It reacts in ways that I consider predictable for an opaque yellow glass and while the rods can be a little shocky, and if you get it too hot it boils, it is not an unpleasant colour to use.

One of the tricky things about Vetrofond Sunshine is how grainy it is when it's hot. It's a hard colour to get good coverage with in thin layers, making dots and stringer lines of it on top of other colours sort of mottled and untidy.


Silver spreads out on top of Sunshine and turns a silvery brownish colour, keeping its shine. The Sunshine underneath fumes a deeper, brownish colour. I put additional dots of Sunshine on top of the silver in the bead on the left, and they stayed mostly yellow, but do have a greenish tinge to their edges and have a distinct line around them where the silver has grudgingly given way. In the bead on the right, the reduced and encased silver has taken on a sort of ethereal bent on top of the Sunshine, turning faintly blue and pink in places. If the ethereal pink and blue covered the whole bead, it would be attractive. If that is achievable every time with more careful application of the silver, that would be pretty neat. More experimentation required.


On top of Sunshine, I got really nice colour and coverage with my reducing silver glass frit, and a nice variety of blues and greens popping. In the bead on the right, my TerraNova2 frit is largely unspectacular, although I did get some colour here and there. This is a colour that seems to be a better base for reduction colours. If only it weren't yellow.

On top of Tuxedo, Sunshine looks sort of livid and splotchy. Tuxedo dots and stringer lines on top of Sunshine cause a little activity in the Sunshine underneath and receive a faint yellow outer ring.

Copper Green and Sunshine have a reciprocal dark line reaction. When Sunshine is used over Copper Green, that dark line is brown and spready, engulfing and transforming most of the Sunshine dots and stringer lines so that they look more brown than yellow. When Copper Green is used over Sunshine, it develops an army green shiniess and a black outline.

Something about using Sunshine with Opal Yellow made my Opal Yellow do some very strange greying things, in both of the test beads.

There is not much in the way of reaction between Sunshine and Ivory, but when Sunshine dots and stringer lines are made on top of Ivory, the yellowness of the Sunshine seems to creep into the Ivory, leaving what is left of the Sunshine looking more of a mustard colour and making the Ivory seem more yellow. The same effect in reverse is visible when Ivory stringer dots and lines are placed over Sunshine.

Peace and Sunshine also seem mutually reactive, but there are multiple things going on so it's hard to describe. The Peace seems to separate, both when Sunshine is on top of it and vice versa, but the two colours in combination also cause some greying/blotchiness. It's not attractive, so I'm not bothering to analyze it further.

Here are some fun rainbow beads with Sunshine. Apart from hiding it in vine cane, the only thing I can ever really think of to do with a yellow this bright is to put it into rainbow beads. When I make rainbow beads with an opaque yellow in them, I need to be careful because yellows, like Ivory, don't usually react particularly nicely to greens. To proactively solve this problem, I encase my Sunshine with Reichenbach Mystic Yellow, which is a yellow translucent that does not have that problem.

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