Test Results :: Kelp

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 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Stringer (encased), 8 & 9 - w/ Peace, Ivory, Opal Yellow, Copper Green, and Tuxedo

Effetre Kelp (090) is an extremely soft transparent colour that is highly reactive. In its natural state, it is a pale greenish yellow colour that scuzzes up fairly easily while you're working it. You can really see the scumming when you make a larger sculptural piece with this colour, and I'm wondering if it's me (my glass might not be sparkling clean) or if it's the colour. The only way for me to find out for sure is wash some of it and repeat some of the tests, and that might happen.

Kelp behaves really similarly to some other colours in the 104 Palette, and I consider it to be in the same 'colour family' as:
- Effetre Straw Yellow (049)
- Effetre Yellow (008)
- Effetre Pale Green Apple (073)
- Effetre Light Brown Transparent (018)
- CiM Mojito (482)

I am sure that there are other colours that fall into this grouping as well, and I'm looking for them as I test new-to-me colours.

Silver is not very attractive on top of Kelp. In the leftmost bead, the silver crusted up on the surface of the Kelp and fumed the colour of the Kelp a darker, more orange version of itself. In the bead on the right, reducing and encasing the silver has smoothed it out and caught a bit of blue fume in places, but this reaction is not terribly attractive with the colour of Kelp.

On top of Kelp, reducing silver glass develops beautiful, shiny colour. And Kelp makes great frit stringer too. In the rightmost bead, I used Kelp with a blend of reducing silver glass to make frit stringer, and then wrapped the stringer around a core of Kelp and encased it with clear without reducing it first.

My TerraNova2 frit got some pretty nice strike to reds and purples without too much effort. Overall, I'd say Kelp is an impressive base for silver glass.

On top of Kelp, Opal Yellow gets a faint separation line in the middle of dots and stringer lines. Ivory lines and dots look just a faint touch darker around the edges than they do in the middle. Tuxedo seems to have spread a little on top of Kelp with its edges looking a bit hazy.

Copper Green gets really oddly shiny and outlined on top of Kelp, and when Kelp is used on top of Copper Green, the Copper Green looks alternately dark grey and bright turquoise without a lot of rhyme or reason to help you predict which thing it will do where.

Apart from that, Kelp didn't do much in terms of reacting with these colours.

In the goddess bead here, you can tell that Kelp (at least my Kelp) gets kind've scummy when it's worked. Cleaning the rods really well could potentially improve this situation, but I haven't tried that yet. These rods weren't particularly dirty, and I did wipe them on my shirt before using them which sort of, sometimes passes for cleaning in this house.

And here is a pretty early frog bead that I made in 2009 with Kelp when I'd been torching for less than a year. Looking at it makes me smile.