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July 24, 2017

Test Results :: Nile Green


Effetre Nile Green is a pretty, vibrant spring green. It's super-soft, making it a fast melter. It's also quite reactive with other colours.


Here, you can see that in the bead I reduced (the one on the right), a cloudy greyish sheen has appeared on its surface, not unlike the greyish sheen that we sometimes see on turquoises and teals. I think this means that this colour has some Copper in it, although it's hard to be sure.


Here, I've compared Effetre Pea Green, Effetre Grasshopper, CiM Shrubbery, CiM Elphaba, Effetre Nile Green, and Reichenbach Olive.  Nile Green is more of a true green than many of these, not containing much yellow at all.  Now that I see what I've done here, I could wish that I had also included some teals to show how much greener Nile Green is, but I didn't, so you'll have to take my word for it being a pretty middle-of-the-road, minty green and not really tending towards blue, either.


On top of Nile Green, silver seems to just settle and shine in a fine lacy pattern. When it is reduced and encased, it gets a silvery sheen to it under the clear.


In both of these beads, you can see that the silver glass frit has been shunted into the middle of the bead is a very pronounced way. This is because of the softness of the Nile Green.  I like the pretty splash of blue I got from my reducing silver glass frit on top of this colour, but don't have much use for it as a base for striking silver glass.


Nile Green and Ivory form a reciprocal dark line reaction. When Nile Green is used on top of Ivory, the line is light brown and sort of fuzzy. When Ivory is used on top of Nile Green, the line is a bit darker and more distinct.

Nile Green is a very soft colour, and seems to both spread and separate on top of almost everything. Oddly, everything I used except for the Tuxedo separated on top of Nile Green as well.

Here are some beads that contain Nile Green.




July 18, 2017

Test Results :: Light Red


Effetre Light Red is a gorgeous colour. I don't know what took me so long to try it, but I am glad I have found it eventually :)  It's sort of in the middle of the red hues, and seems like a real, true red until you pull it out thin over white or use it in thin layers over white, when it looks more orange.


Here, you can see that Light Red doesn't change when it is reduced. It also seems not to alter much with repeated heating and cooling, maybe darkening just a bit.


One of the benefits of all of the anal-retentive planning I do is that I occasionally get to recycle a picture instead of taking a new one, and this is one of those times.  Here, you can see that Light Red is very slightly darker than Reichenbach Lipstick, and is substantially lighter than CiM Maraschino, Valentine, and Hemoglobin.


On top of Light Red, silver clouded up and visibly bunched on top of the base colour. It also fumed the base colour a dark, bluish colour. When the silver was reduced and encased, it turned blue.


Silver Glass is very pretty on top of Light Red, both the reducing kind and the striking kind.


In terms of reactions, this colour was surprisingly volatile.

On top of Tuxedo, my stringer dots and lines are decidedly mottled and blotchy.  I also got a reciprocal dark line reaction with Copper Green, and then some separation inside my stringer dots and lines of Copper Green, Ivory, and Peace when used on top of Light Red.

Opal Yellow, when I used it on top of Light Red, got a strange, irregular blotchy brownish edging to it, and where I used Light Red over Ivory, the Ivory has crept over its edges in places to do that milk moustache thing it sometimes does to other colours.

I think the very weirdest thing though is that when I used Light Red on top of Peace, so much of the red bled into the Peace that it looks pink.

Here are some other beads that contain Light Red.






July 10, 2017

Test Results :: Eel Grass


CiM Eel Grass (CiM456) is a beautiful medium forest green colour.  It is a little more muted and less yellow than CiM Slytherin. I think that it is more reminiscent of CiM Algae in colour, only lighter and much less reactive. It's a keeper.  I want more :)


Here's some Eel Grass sandwiched between CiM Algae and Effetre Pale Emerald.


Like Peat Moss, Eel Grass has a tendency to bubble a little as it is being worked.  This problem is exacerbated when you use it in stringer form. The boiling can be prevented by working cool, but I am less good at that than I'd like to be, so bubbles.


On top of Eel Grass, silver disperses and beads up. When the silver is reduced and encased in clear, it fumes a very pretty colour of blue. Eel Grass does not change the colour of silver when it is used to encase silver foil.


I knew that Eel Grass was probably not going to work well as reducing glass frit stringer before I made the leftmost bead here because the Eel Grass-encased silver foil round did not turn gold, but I tried it anyway.

My reducing silver glass frit and my TerraNova2 frit both took to this colour very well.  Now that I have tested a few of them, I'm thinking that transparent greens that are not reactive with silver pgenerally make good bases for silver glass. I had great results with Effetre Dark Grass Green (which you already know if you read this blog a lot because I can't seem to shut up about it), Effetre Sage Transparent, and CiM Slytherin as well before this one.


In the bead on the right, you can see that Eel Grass lightens significantly when used over other colours. It also appears to be one of the colours that keeps Copper Green a bit cleaner than it tends to stay on its own.

In terms of reactions, this colour is pretty mild.  The opaque colours I used on top of it separated, but that seems to be a pretty normal thing for them to do on top of a transparent and maybe not very remarkable at all, although I'll still log it as truth.

Here are some other beads involving Eel Grass:





July 3, 2017

Test Results :: Marine Green


Effetre Marine Green (EFF290) is a gorgeous, bright opaque turquoise that is more on the green side than Effetre Light Turquoise and fairly similar in colour to CiM Celadon. Marine Green has similar reactions to CiM Celadon, although there are some key differences.  It is less viscous than CiM Celadon, having a somewhat runnier consistency. It turns dark when it is molten, but lightens back up as it cools.

When Art Glass House was still selling 104 CoE glass, they called this colour Rofranna Turquoise. So, if you are wondering what the heck I am talking about when I say Marine Green, that might be why.


I did use Marine Green in this set of test beads that I did with CiM Quetzal, and you can see it here in contrast to a bunch of other colours in the same colour family.


Marine Green is harder to reduce than other turquoise colours.  I really worked at getting a brick red reduction coating on the rightmost bead here with very little success.  I achieved a sort of darkish shadow and that was about it.


Another key way in which Marine Green differs from other turquoise colours is that I didn't get a lot of yellowing from the silver I reduced and encased here in the rightmost bead.  In the bead on the left, the silver dispersed and just sort of sat greyishly on the surface of the bead.


My reducing silver glass all migrated to the middle of this bead, I think because of how much softer the Marine Green is than the transparent silver glasses I put on top of it.  I did not really get any interesting results from the silver glass in either bead.


Where I used Tuxedo on top of Marine Green, the edges of the Tuxedo dots and stringer lines fuzzed up, and in some cases, were overtaken by some cloudy Marine Green blotches, which was unexpected.

On top of Marine Green, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace all separate.  In Ivory's case, a significant amount of brown reaction line also resulted.

Marine Green separated on top of everything else I used here, and on top of Ivory developed a wide brown reaction outline.

Here are some other beads that include Marine Green: