Test Results :: Soft Rose

1 - Plain (reduced), 2 - Plain, 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

Kugler Soft Rose (B151) is a gorgeous light to medium pink colour.  I really like some of its reactions, and it was buttery soft to work with.  I was looking for similarities with either Effetre Silver Pink or Lauscha Faded Rose, but apart from its tendency to fume yellow with silver, I didn't really find much similarity with either colour.  This isn't a bad thing at all -- variety is good!  I often find my expectations turned around this way with glass, and it keeps me on my toes :)

It is not a good idea to encase this colour -- like Golden, its transparent cousin, this colour does NOT do well underneath other colours.  It is, however, moderately reactive and seemed to have tons of potential in organic designs.

The most disappointing thing about Soft Rose is that it seems not to be compatible when layered with other colours. I made this set of beads with Soft Rose as the base, and all of the other ingredients are things that I routinely use in beads of this style.  The Soft Rose has cracked all over the place in tiny incompatibility fractures. I had hoped that this colour was just incompatible with being encased, but the problem seems more serious than that.

As a result, I won't be purchasing this colour again or using it in my beads. It is possible that the problem is batch-dependent and that some future batch of Soft Rose will work just fine, but there are too many nice colours that don't have this problem for me to bother coming back to this one.

Soft Rose is sensitive to flame chemistry, and as you can see in the bead on the left, darkens and deepens in colour when it is reduced.

Like many pinks, Soft Rose fumes yellow when silver is added to it.  I'll say it again - don't encase this colour. There are crazy cracks all through the other side of the rightmost bead, and as you can see, a giant crack right through this side of it.

I'd say that Soft Rose is average as a base colour for silver glass.  The leftmost bead got some interesting colour and shine, and I got a little colour from my TerraNova2 frit. (See cracking notes above - it doesn't matter how nice the reactions are if the result is a bead fit for the garbage)

I won't be able to talk about what Opal Yellow looks like on top of Soft Rose, because apparently I accidentally picked up my Ivory stringer when it was time to do the stringer dots and lines with Opal Yellow, and did Ivory twice instead of Opal Yellow and then Ivory.  Oops!

Tuxedo spreads out and causes a purplish halo reaction when used on top of Soft Rose.  When Soft Rose is used on top of Tuxedo, the edges of the Soft Rose stringer lines and dots get a three-dimensional puffy look to them.

Ivory spreads out and does really interesting mosaicy (that's a word, right?) things on top of Soft Rose.  You can see that in the space in the leftmost bead where I was supposed to do Opal Yellow dots and lines, and also in the usual spot.  The Ivory has separated the Soft Rose so that it rises up in halos around the Ivory, and then the Ivory has gone sort of brownish around its edges, and then where it has remained Ivory, gone sort of 'fluffy' for lack of a better word and developed interesting curdling/reticulation effects to boot.  Three reaction effects for the price of one... it really doesn't get much cooler than that.

Here is a goddess bead made with Soft Rose.  You can see some yellowish blushing that I guess is the result of striking the glass during its construction.  My flame is a little reducing since I only have a 5 lpm concentrator, so that may also be part or all of the cause.