Test Results :: Mosaic Green

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 & 8 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory & Peace

Effetre Mosaic Green is another crazy colour. I seem to be writing up test results for quite a few of those lately.

Mosaic Green is a pure dark green. You can't really get greener than this colour. I'm a little confused about whether it's an opaque or a transparent, because it has a transparent colour number and is sold at Frantz as a transparent, but I have also seen it sold as an opaque colour (on Delphi's website, for one) and it seems not transparent at all to me when I use it. When pulled out into stringer, it's very transparent (but DARK), although as you can see, it is not transparent in any of these test beads.

You can see in the self-coloured spacer on the left that Mosaic Green is a crazily streaky, mottling colour. When Mosaic Green is reduced, all of the bits between the dark streaks develop a rich red copper patina.

When Silver Leaf is melted into the surface of Mosaic Green, it just kinda disappears, except for some silvery bits that seem to get stuck in the 'cracks' formed by the mottled webbing of the surface. When the silver is reduced and encased, it goes a weird blueish grey colour, in a lacy, low-surface-coverage kind of way.

Silver Glass is not particularly effective on top of Mosaic Green, although the results are sort of interesting. My reducing silver glass frit has been somewhat swallowed by the Mosaic Green so there's not much left on the surface, but for the frit that IS left on the surface, an interesting separation has occured so that the edges of the frit are far lighter than the middles of each little bit. My TerraNova2 frit struck to blue on top of Mosaic Green, but the Mosaic Green so aggressively swallowed so much of it that it's not all that evident.

On top of Tuxedo, Mosaic Green separates so that it is lighter and more opaque around the edges, and is dark and seems completely transparent in the middle of the stringer lines. This might just be an illusion because it's on black and Mosaic Green is so dark, but it's odd. Tuxedo doesn't do much on top of Mosaic Green, although the Mosaic Green underneath it in the bead on the right looks more crazily mottled than it does under either Copper Green or Opal Yellow.

Copper Green separates on top of Mosaic Green, and the separation is a lot like what it does on top of EDP, Sedona, Steel Blue, Olive, Cocoa, Flamingo, Opal Raspberry (and I'm sure I'm missing some), but there is a slight difference. The dark line in the centre of the Copper Green lines and the dots in the middle of the Copper Green dots are more of an intense blue colour than they are turquoise, and they are also super thin/small. The edges of the Copper Green stringer work look almost frayed, because of the Mosaic Green bleeding into them.

When Mosaic Green is used on top of Copper Green, a light turquoise halo pops up around the Mosaic Green stringer lines, and a darker turquoise veining remains underneath, looking kind've like grout. The Mosaic Green separates so that a dark line runs down its centre, less dramatically than with Tuxedo but still pretty intensely.

Opal Yellow on top of Mosaic Green is a pretty similar story to what I just explained about the Copper Green reaction, except that the Opal Yellow takes on a lot of the Mosaic Green colour. You can see around the edges of the Opal Yellow stringer work that there has been a crazy amount of bleeding and almost all of the yellow has some level of green contamination. Also, the line down the middle of the Opal Yellow stringer work looks black rather than blue. When Mosaic Green is used on top of Opal Yellow, the Opal Yellow rises up around it in self-coloured halos, and the Mosaic Green bleeds into it.

When Ivory stringer work is done on top of Mosaic Green, it doesn't develop a dark line reaction. It just turns a dark brownish black completely. When Mosaic Green is used on top of Ivory, all of the Mosaic Green stringer lines and dots are surrounded by a dark brown miasma, that sort of reminds me of what happens in SimCity when your industrial buildings cause ground pollution.

In order to not repeat myself too much, I'm going to cheat and say that Peace reacts with Mosaic Green in almost the exact same way as Opal Yellow when it is used on top of Mosaic Green. However, when Mosaic Green is used on top of Peace, it doesn't really get those cool raised 'halos' that the Opal Yellow gets, and the Mosaic Green bleeds into it a lot. So much that the edges of the dots and stringer lines are sort of hard to look at because of their neon green-ness.

Mosaic Green is unexpectedly beautiful in sculptural work. It looks like Malachite in my goddess bead.

Test Results :: Phoenix

CiM Phoenix is a vibrant striking colour. The colour of fully-struck Phoenix is quite close to Vetrofond Poppy, although it is a little more on the orange side and the glass itself is utterly different in terms of its viscosity and its tendency to strike.

Unstruck Phoenix (not pictured, because I'm a doofus) is a pale peachy colour, although in my experience it's a little challenging to keep it that way. Other people have had better success keeping the peach colour though, and I gather (Thanks, Dwyn Tomlinson!) that the secret to keeping it is to just not reheat the bead again after you have it initially shaped.

Well, my Phoenix is pretty much fully struck. And it's done quite a few interesting things that I want to share with you.

Here, you can see in the bead on the left that melting silver leaf into the surface of Phonix has resulted in the silver having a weird greenish gold lacy effect to it, and turned the glass underneath a rich rose colour. When the silver is reduced and encased, for some reason, it turns blue. I'm learning that silver seems to do this blue thing when reduced and encased over a lot of the 'hot' colours.

These funny little lozenge beads with chill marks (anyone else notice that it's harder to melt chill marks out of the lozenge shape?) are my silver glass tests. As you can see, both reducing silver glass and striking silver glass do really amazingly well on top of Phoenix.

My reducing silver glass frit has developed a completely unexpected spectrum of pinkish and yellowish colours. In addition, it got dark lines around the fritty bits but apart from a little brownish bleeding left the Phoenix underneath more or less intact.

And my TerraNova2 frit. Just wow! I got fantastic colour out of it, and it has the same dark outlines and brown bleed as the reducing frit did.

Yum.

There isn't much going on when Tuxedo is used over Phoenix, but when Phoenix is used over Tuxedo, the lines and stringer dots get a greyer, translucent line around them and the bright colour of phoenix migrates to the centre of those dots or lines. When I saw this reaction with Sprout, I thought it was unusual. I think now that I just haven't been testing enough of the colours that have this reaction. After all, I've only tested ~150 colours out of what seems like a possible gazillion.

Phoenix helps Copper Green not to get that greyish sheen on it when the two colours are used together, and the two glasses develop a mutual dark line reaction. On top of Phoenix, Copper Green has a subtle line that looks almost like a shadow, but when Phoenix is on top of Copper Green, the line is very dark and distinct.

Opal Yellow is sort of subtle and weird on top of Phoenix. It's gone faintly blotchy in my dots and stringer lines, and there is an ever-so-faint line running around the edges. It also has spread out and almost curdled in places. It sort of makes me wonder what might happen if these two glasses were super-heated in combination with each other. When Phoenix is used on top of Opal Yellow, it develops a faint, darker orange border around it which is also pretty cool.

When Ivory is used on top of Phoenix, it sort of loses its cohesion. You can see in the bead on the left that the Ivory has curdled and gone translucent all over the place. No such weird thing happens when Phoenix is used on top of Ivory however. If you're looking for a crisp orange on Ivory colour combination to use with stringer work, this one seems like it might have potential.

On top of Phoenix, Peace lets some of the orange colour through, seeming slightly semi-opaque. When Phoenix is used on top of Peace, the Phoenix bleeds into the Peace, flooding it with a pinkish orange colour.

Now, it's not very scientific to speculate, unless you call it a hypothesis, so I am going to hypothesize that if I were to mix three parts Peace to, say, one part Phoenix, that I might just achieve a peachy pink colour. I haven't tried this, but I think I just might after I get my studio cleaned out and ready for the season next weekend.

Whew! My long-winded ramblings about Phoenix are finished, and here are some beads that I made with it sometime in the last few months.

The set is Phoenix, Kugler Pea Green, Effetre Opal Yellow and Effetre Periwinkle. The goddess is pure Phoenix, although I seem not to have fully struck her belly. And yes, I know that her boobs are oddly lopsided... but if the scientist in me wasn't stronger than the perfectionist, then I'd never post any beads at all. :)