Test Results :: Phoenix

CiM Phoenix is a vibrant striking colour. The colour of fully-struck Phoenix is quite close to Vetrofond Poppy, although it is a little more on the orange side and the glass itself is utterly different in terms of its viscosity and its tendency to strike.

Unstruck Phoenix (not pictured, because I'm a doofus) is a pale peachy colour, although in my experience it's a little challenging to keep it that way. Other people have had better success keeping the peach colour though, and I gather (Thanks, Dwyn Tomlinson!) that the secret to keeping it is to just not reheat the bead again after you have it initially shaped.

Well, my Phoenix is pretty much fully struck. And it's done quite a few interesting things that I want to share with you.

Here, you can see in the bead on the left that melting silver leaf into the surface of Phonix has resulted in the silver having a weird greenish gold lacy effect to it, and turned the glass underneath a rich rose colour. When the silver is reduced and encased, for some reason, it turns blue. I'm learning that silver seems to do this blue thing when reduced and encased over a lot of the 'hot' colours.

These funny little lozenge beads with chill marks (anyone else notice that it's harder to melt chill marks out of the lozenge shape?) are my silver glass tests. As you can see, both reducing silver glass and striking silver glass do really amazingly well on top of Phoenix.

My reducing silver glass frit has developed a completely unexpected spectrum of pinkish and yellowish colours. In addition, it got dark lines around the fritty bits but apart from a little brownish bleeding left the Phoenix underneath more or less intact.

And my TerraNova2 frit. Just wow! I got fantastic colour out of it, and it has the same dark outlines and brown bleed as the reducing frit did.

Yum.

There isn't much going on when Tuxedo is used over Phoenix, but when Phoenix is used over Tuxedo, the lines and stringer dots get a greyer, translucent line around them and the bright colour of phoenix migrates to the centre of those dots or lines. When I saw this reaction with Sprout, I thought it was unusual. I think now that I just haven't been testing enough of the colours that have this reaction. After all, I've only tested ~150 colours out of what seems like a possible gazillion.

Phoenix helps Copper Green not to get that greyish sheen on it when the two colours are used together, and the two glasses develop a mutual dark line reaction. On top of Phoenix, Copper Green has a subtle line that looks almost like a shadow, but when Phoenix is on top of Copper Green, the line is very dark and distinct.

Opal Yellow is sort of subtle and weird on top of Phoenix. It's gone faintly blotchy in my dots and stringer lines, and there is an ever-so-faint line running around the edges. It also has spread out and almost curdled in places. It sort of makes me wonder what might happen if these two glasses were super-heated in combination with each other. When Phoenix is used on top of Opal Yellow, it develops a faint, darker orange border around it which is also pretty cool.

When Ivory is used on top of Phoenix, it sort of loses its cohesion. You can see in the bead on the left that the Ivory has curdled and gone translucent all over the place. No such weird thing happens when Phoenix is used on top of Ivory however. If you're looking for a crisp orange on Ivory colour combination to use with stringer work, this one seems like it might have potential.

On top of Phoenix, Peace lets some of the orange colour through, seeming slightly semi-opaque. When Phoenix is used on top of Peace, the Phoenix bleeds into the Peace, flooding it with a pinkish orange colour.

Now, it's not very scientific to speculate, unless you call it a hypothesis, so I am going to hypothesize that if I were to mix three parts Peace to, say, one part Phoenix, that I might just achieve a peachy pink colour. I haven't tried this, but I think I just might after I get my studio cleaned out and ready for the season next weekend.

Whew! My long-winded ramblings about Phoenix are finished, and here are some beads that I made with it sometime in the last few months.

The set is Phoenix, Kugler Pea Green, Effetre Opal Yellow and Effetre Periwinkle. The goddess is pure Phoenix, although I seem not to have fully struck her belly. And yes, I know that her boobs are oddly lopsided... but if the scientist in me wasn't stronger than the perfectionist, then I'd never post any beads at all. :)