Test Results :: Valentine

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - Plain (encased), 4 - w/ Silver Leaf, 5 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 6 - w/ TerraNova2 frit (but inadvertantly reduced), 7 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 8 & 9 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace

CiM Valentine is a gorgeous, bright and dark velvety red that looks burgundy in some lights. This colour is REALLY HARD to photograph. It is much redder than it looks in these pictures, but under white lights like the ones with my photography cube, it looks more burgundy. It is the same colour of red as the red velvet I remember in my grandmother's wallpaper when I was a kid, although that won't really mean anything to you unless you also visited my grandmother's house. But picture a deep, romantic red velvet and that is what these beads look like in natural light. There are some better representations of the colour on the CiM site.

I am problem-prone this month, and these beads demonstrate the general chaos of my life as I hop around between Edmonton, Sioux Falls and Vancouver, still trying to find time to make beads on Saturdays and do normal life things. You can see in the picture above that I accidentally reduced the bead with the TerraNova2 frit on it -- that's why the frit looks all red and gross. I also included the wrong reducing silver glass bead in this set of test results having mixed up my beads for Maraschino and Valentine like a big boob. I've semi-fixed it below by including a separate photograph of the right bead, the same way I did in my results for Maraschino. Thank goodness I only made one set of test beads last week.

On top of Valentine, Silver Leaf sort of spreads out and takes on a rather pretty brown/beige mottled appearance. When the silver is subsequently reduced and encased, it forms a brownish/blueish coating under the clear that is not really all that attractive.

I am not used to working with Natural Gas and Liquid Oxygen, and I guess I had a reducing flame when I made the test bead with TerraNova2 frit, because all that weird redness showed up. It seems like Valentine would be a better base for striking silver glass than I've really demonstrated here, but I can't prove it since I buggered my test up.

If you read my test results for Maraschino, you know that I'm a big dummy and I got the reducing silver glass bead mixed up when I was taking the pictures. Here's the real Valentine bead:

I like the way the frit developed at the edges, and the blues/greens on red are always striking.

Here we have Valentine with Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace. It seems like a pretty stable colour with not all that much in the way of reactions to report, but I did observe a few strange things:

Copper Green doesn't separate with Valentine or develop a really distinct dark line reaction, but it does look curiously mottled, with a pinkish haze developing on the surface of it on both of these beads.

Opal Yellow develops a mottled brown line reaction when used on top of Valentine, but not uniformly. This is sort of a cool effect, almost like a tea stain line. This reaction is NOT reciprocated when Valentine is used on top of Opal Yellow, which is sort of curious.

Peace separates fairly dramatically when used on top of Valentine, but when you use Valentine on top of Peace, nothing strange happens at all.