Test Results :: Vanilla Latte

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 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

CiM Vanilla Latte is just a beautiful colour of tan, that falls somewhere hue-wise between the beautiful pale of Butter Pecan and the rich terracotta of Adobe. The glass is creamy and wonderful to use, and just loves silver. Vanilla Latte is the first CiM colour that I have used where I have observed any curdling effect. I have so many more things I want to try with this colour, but will have to wait until it is for sale in January like everyone else before I can get any more.

This is a colour that will be gorgeous as a base colour for organics. It is nice to use for sculptural work, but like a lot of other CiM colours, you can see streaky joining rings wherever new glass is added to old, so you'll need to keep that in mind.

For those of us who like making organic beads, the bead on the left shows how beautiful Vanilla Latte is with silver. The silver leaf I used has turned sort of golden on top of the Vanilla Latte, has spread out, looks a little wispy in places, and has fumed the Vanilla Latte to a golden brown sort of randomly. When the silver leaf is reduced and encased, it develops a shiny silver coating that is heavily tinged with both blue and pink under the clear.

The bead on the left, with my reducing silver glass frit, got so shiny that it was extremely difficult to photograph. And I got beautiful colour out of my TerraNova frit, considering that I didn't even strike it properly. I think I must have had a little less oxygen in my flame than I needed because there are some red reduction streaks visible in the fritty bits.

The most interesting reaction here is the one that occurred between Tuxedo and Vanilla Latte in the bead on the right. The Vanilla Latte has risen up in halos around the Tuxedo, and in places that halos are ringed with an extra outline of black that must have migrated from the Tuxedo.

Copper Green likes Vanilla Latte, and the two colours develop a very faint dark line reaction, but the big takeaway here is that using these two colours together keeps Copper Green looking pretty and turquoisey instead of greyish green.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace all spread on top of Vanilla Latte, making the stringer dots and lines quite a bit wider than I thought they were when I put them on. When Vanilla Latte is used on top of those colours, it seems to sink very slightly into the surface, resulting in thinner lines and smaller dots than I actually applied to the bead.

Finally, in the bead on the right, not only did the Opal Yellow spread out, but it has also gone all strangely mottled, with darker yellow in the centre of the stringer dots and lines and paleness towards the outer edge. It hasn't really separated, but it looks pretty neat.

Here are some fun beads with Vanilla Latte. You can see evidence of the colour curdling if you click on the goddess picture to see a bigger version of it and check out her belly.