Test Results :: Light Aqua

Effetre Light Aqua (EFF034) is a medium, transparent aqua colour.

I wanted Light Aqua to turn red when I reduced it, but I couldn't make it do that. It did darken and start to look sort of dirty after multiple reduction attempts, though, so that's something.

Here, I've used some of the more 'aqua' blues in my stash to show you Light Aqua against a backdrop of other, similar colours. As you can see here, it's much less of a jump saturation-wise to Dark Aqua from Light Aqua than it is from Pale Aqua to Light Aqua. I wish there was another step between Pale Aqua and Light Aqua.

Here is Light Aqua with Light Teal and the newer CiM Poolside for some additional comparison.

Reducing and encasing silver on top of Light Aqua makes it turn yellow. Silver on the surface and silver under Light Aqua stay silvery.

Light Aqua is unremarkable as a base for silver glass. It's decent, but there was nothing extraordinary about these beads.

Light Aqua develops a dark line reaction with Light Ivory, but you'll notice that this is much more evident when the Light Ivory is under the Light Aqua. You can see the brownness through the Light Ivory which is actually quite pretty.

Apart from that, the only thing that really stood out here is that Opal Yellow separates on top of this colour, developing a ring around its edges that gives the illusion of being raised off the surface of the bead, almost like it's beveled.

Here are some other beads made with Effetre Light Aqua:

Test Results :: Amphibian

The stock paddle photo of CiM Amphibian (CiM 423) is a very interesting two-toned green colour, so when I started using this I thought the beads would come out that way. They don't, but the uniform grey-green colour that Amphibian does yield is beautiful.

I really enjoyed using this colour. It is a pretty green that has an interesting reaction profile. It doesn't react negatively with Ivory and other sulfur-containing colours and it fumes brown with silver. This is not unlike what I have observed with Effetre Grasshopper, but Amphibian is a bit bluer, and quite a bit greyer than Grasshopper.

Amphibian doesn't change when you reduce it.

Silver crusts up on top of Amphibian and turns it a yellowish brown colour. When the silver is reduced and encased, it evens out on the surface of the bead and looks uniformly silvery.

On top of Amphibian, silver glass frit blooms. In both of these beads, I got excellent colour in the silver glass. In the leftmost bead where I reduced the frit, you can see a golden aura around the fritty bit edges.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace all separate on top of Amphibian. Amphibian separates on top of Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Ivory (but, oddly, not Peace.)

On top of Amphibian, Opal Yellow also develops a strange dark yellow line around it. I'm not really sure what to make of this reaction because I've never seen it before, but I quite like it.

These beads all contain a little Amphibian.

Test Results :: Mystic Violet

Reichenbach Mystic Violet (RL0201) is a medium purple semi-opaque colour that works up like shampoo glass. The more you heat and work this colour, the more it loses its rich, pretty purpleness, so if you want to keep the dark plumminess that you see in my spacer beads below, don't use presses on it, and work quickly.

Mystic Violet devitrifies, and is very sensitive to overworking. I made a goddess bead with it, and everywhere I joined new Mystic Violet to old Mystic Violet and melted it in, the seams are pocked with little marks from where the glass pitted and devitrified. 

I left this goddess bead in the tumbler for I don't even know how many cycles, and it never really ended up looking the way I wished it would. The devitrification was so strong that even tumbling her for so long that the grit in my tumbler wore her nipples off couldn't fix the discolouration and pitting problems.

Here you can see that Mystic Violet is a little lighter than Effetre Medium Amethyst, and you can also see the shampoo effect as it's worked up. Because of the 'mystic' shampooness of it, you can see a lot more of this glass' colour than you usually can from a transparent that is this deep. Case in point -- what colour would you say Dark Amethyst and Simply Berry were if you didn't already know they were purple?

Silver beads up and disperses on top of Mystic Violet. When the silver is reduced and encased, it looks fairly uniformly mauve on top of this colour, and has a slightly lacy feel to it.

In the bead on the left, you can see from my one press and subsequent firepolishing of this bead that the colour is starting to leave the Mystic Violet.

Mystic Violet isn't remarkable as a base for silver glass. I got an 'ok' starting strike in my TerraNova2 frit, but nothing remarkable.

Mystic Violet is not very reactive, but Copper Green does separate on top of it. To a much lesser degree, so do Opal Yellow and Ivory.

Here are some other beads made with Mystic Violet.