CiM Cranberry is a deep, rich fuschia colour and a nice, dense transparent pink. Deciding whether I prefer this colour or if I prefer Effetre Rubino Oro is sort of difficult, because I like them both for different reasons. I will talk about some of the similarities and differences as we move down through my test beads.
1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ Silver Foil, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 8 & 9 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, Peace
Cranberry is a deeper, richer colour than Rubino Oro -- or at least, this particular batch of Cranberry is/was deeper and richer in colour than the batch of Rubino Oro that I had back in 2012 when I made my Rubino Oro test beads.
Silver does fascinating things on top of Cranberry. You can see in the bead on the left how the silver has gone green and yellow and brown on top of it. In the right-most bead, you can see how the silver foil I sandwiched between two layers of cranberry has turned a vivid pinkish orange colour.
The first bead where I melted silver leaf into the surface resulted in the same green/yellow/brown reaction that I got with Rubino, but in the second bead where I reduced and encased the silver, the silver stayed much more 'silver' than it did when I performed the same test with Rubino. It is possible that I may have used a different clear, though, so I will try to do a better job of keeping track of that in future. In the Rubino Oro bead, the silver turned pink and yellow under the encasement.
I don't think that encasing Cranberry is an especially good idea. The bead in the middle has cranberry, then a layer of silver leaf, and then was reduced and encased with Clear. It has cracked right down the middle.
In these beads, you can see what an interesting base colour cranberry is for silver glass. Both my reducing and striking silver glass frit got all interesting on top of this colour. I got beautiful, vivid colour from the TerraNova2 frit in the bead on the right, and in the bead on the left, the reducing silver glass frit developed interesting separation lines and halos and also left some blue fume on the surface of the Cranberry.
When I did these tests with Rubino Oro, I got funny brownish gunkiness around the edges of my reduction frit, and the colours in both test beads were much more washed-out looking, although the TerraNova2 frit got good colour on top of Rubino as well.
So, this picture is a bit confusing because I stupidly put the colours on the bead in the wrong order in the bead on the right, mixing up the placement of Opal Yellow and Ivory. Since I made these beads and took these pictures sometime last year, I don't still have the beads lying around to take another picture, so you will need to use your imagination to see things in the right order. It is in the bead on the right that the order is screwed up.
Tuxedo didn't react with the Cranberry or vice versa.
Cranberry caused my Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace to separate when I used those colours on top of it to make stringer dots and lines.
In addition to separating Ivory, Cranberry also turns it brown, although sort of differently from how I experienced this reaction with Rubino Oro. While in my Rubino test results, Rubino turned brownish on top of Ivory, when I used Cranberry on top of Ivory I got dramatic dark, brownish black splotches that took over that part of the bead. In my Rubino test results, when I used Ivory on top of Rubino, the Ivory went completely brown. With Cranberry, only the edges of the Ivory turned brown, and in a kind've neat, fuzzy, watercolour way.
Using Copper Green and Opal Yellow underneath Cranberry stringer dots and lines caused the base glass to pop up in halos around the Cranberry. Like with Rubino, the Cranberry spreads out on top of these colours, however it does not thin out as much as Rubino so the effect is not as subtle.
I didn't get the same kind of popping halo effect with Peace, which would have surprised me more if I hadn't already had that same result with Rubino Oro.
This is an appalling bead, because it got stuck to something else in the kiln and has gouges in the belly, however it demonstrates very nicely the richness of this colour. You can sort of see in the breasts that the colour is blueish, and I'm not sure what caused this. It is more pronounced in person and has a weird, cloudy quality to it. It happened on both the breasts and on her butt (not shown) and the only thing I can think of is that those places on her got a little less striking than the rest of the sculpture did.
