Test Results :: Anise White

UGH.

1 - w/ Black, 2 - w/ Dark Violet, 3 - w/ Copper Green, 4 - w/ Ivory, 5 - w/ Striking Color frit, 6 - w/ Triton, 7 - w/ Silver leaf - reduced & encased, 8 - w/ Silver leaf, 9 - As a floral - Copper Green core, 10 - Reduced, 11 - Plain

I'm having a little trouble figuring out what to say about Anise White because it's not an offensive colour after its been melted, but I have real hatred for it.  If it wasn't so completely anger-inducing to work with I might even prefer it to regular white, but since it does deeply piss me off, I'm never using it again.

The problem with Anise White isn't that it's shocky.  The problem is that it is so shocky that it's unusable.  You can hold a thin rod of it just beside your flame, gently heating it, and have it all shoot off like deadly popcorn, "POP!  POP!  POP!"  in rapid succession.  I went to the studio with a little more than six rods of Anise White.  I made the beads you see above, and then finally gave up in frustration and threw a rod and a half of it into a waste bin.  Everything in between was in pieces all over my work table.

I had glass in my face, glass up my sleeve and glass all over the damn place.  I will put up with a lot from glass, but this was just a little much.  I think I'll have a permanent scar on my left forearm, and predict that it will burn vengefully whenever Anise White is nearby.

General Impressions

If only it was workable (and who knows... annealing the rods may well help), it might be fun to play with it some more and compare it to regular White or CiM Peace.  I haven't done these kinds of experiments with regular White, so I don't even know if the results are similar.  I should do that, but I'm not using White right now so I can't.

Even if Anise White was workable, though, it still wouldn't have a lot of draw for me.  I'm more of an Ivory person.

Colour Density

In a thin layer, Anise White is fairly translucent, and would be a good choice for making ghost-like florals or trying to create wispy whiteness in a bead.  It might be interesting to use it with a white that is more opaque in a floral design.  (Bead #9)

Reduction

Reducing Anise White turns it a greyer/pinker version of itself.  (Bead #2)

Reactions

When Anise White is paired with silver, the silver fumes the surface of the bead to a caramel colour which is  attractive.  (Bead #8, Bead #6)

I also like that when the silver is subsequently encased, it hasn't been taken over by a reaction between the silver and the Anise White.  (Bead #7) You'll see an example where this doesn't happen so nicely when I post the results for CiM Tamarind Unique.

Anise White is silver-friendly.  I don't think it's a first-tier choice as a base colour for silver glass, but it's definitely one that works.  Triton turns green rather than blue on top of Anise White, and seems to separate with the fine, shiny line in the middle. (Bead #6) This seems like the exact opposite of what I saw in my testing of CiM Great Bluedini.  Please excuse the fingerprint... I really need to get better at not photographing those.

The only other thing really worth mentioning is that Black and Dark Violet bleed into Anise White in a sort of attractive way.  (Bead #1, #2)

As I mentioned, I don't have any "real" beads to show you that use this colour.  Just melting enough of this colour to make the test beads pictured above nearly drove me nuts.