Test Results :: Blue Steel

 

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

CiM Blue Steel is a new Limited Run colour from Creation is Messy. The colour of Blue Steel is similar to, but a bit darker than, the Vetrofond Blue Slate that I have buried in my Vetrofond stash. The colour of blue steel is hard to pin down with a single word, but is somewhere between blue and indigo and grey.

One of my rods of Blue Steel was quite shocky, but the other two were just fine, so if you get a shocky rod or two, just ride it out because they're not all like that.

These beads are both plain Blue Steel, but the bead on the right has been reduced. I'm not sure if it was the reduction or if Blue Steel is a bit of a striker, but the bead I reduced is more purple than the bead I did not reduce.

The other things that might be at play here are that I did not anneal the bead on the left, and I made the larger, bluer bead on a MiniCC and I made the smaller, purpler one on my Minor. I've learned since I made these beads that I've been working on my torch for the last five years with the oxygen hose too long, which may be responsible for this (as well as my ongoing battle with striking some silver glass colours). I've shortened my oxygen hose, so I'm ready to see if it makes any difference next time I have some Blue Steel handy.

In the meantime, all I can do is assure you that your beads will either be the colour on the left OR the colour on the right OR some colour in between OR some other colour entirely, because Blue Steel seems to be sort of sensitive to either flame chemistry, or annealing, or both.

Totally wasn't expecting this. In the bead on the left, I covered the Blue Steel with silver, burnished it in and then burned it off before pressing the bead. The first weird thing is that the silver has turned golden, pink and blue in various patches. The second (but more obvious) weird thing is that the silver has fumed the surface of the Blue Steel to a mustardy olive colour.

In the bead on the right, where I reduced and encased the silver, the Blue Steel is still that weird colour of green around the silver. The silver is oozing an ethereal blue halo under the layer of Clear, and has turned a blueish silver with a subtle MoP effect.

Reducing silver colours don't really play well with the colour of Blue Steel, however I found that Blue Steel is a pretty great base colour for striking silver glass. I got good colour out of my TerraNova2 frit, and I really like the light halos that sprang up all around the fritty bits in the bead on the right.

Blue Steel separates into lighter and darker versions of itself on top of Tuxedo. In the bead on the right, Tuxedo, Copper Green and Opal Yellow all seemed to spread a little on top of Blue Steel.

Blue Steel is not one of the colours that keeps Copper Green from developing a greyish film, although with Blue Steel the film that develops is also a bit on the brown side.

A faint, uneven dark line has showed up around the Blue Steel in the bead where I used it on top of Ivory.

When I used Ivory on top of Blue Steel, the Ivory separated a little and went all streaky, and the Blue Steel has darkened all the way around it in a thick band, but there is no crisp line there. If you click on the picture to the left of these words and look at it enlarged, it seems like the Blue Steel is curdling as well as turning a much darker colour where it surrounds the Ivory.

There seems to be not much in the way of reaction between Blue Steel and Opal Yellow or Blue Steel and Peace, apart from the spreading I already mentioned re: Opal Yellow.

I've used Blue Steel here as the base colour in this organic focal.