Test Results :: Yellow

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 - Silver Glass Frit Stringer (encased), 8 - Over Silver Foil. 9 & 10 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace

I never expected to love Effetre Yellow, but making these test beads has made me love it a lot. The best thing about falling in love with a colour like this one is that it is both cheap and readily available in addition to being really interesting and beautiful. And this is coming from someone who doesn't even really like yellow.

Yellow is reactive with silver but stable with other colours. It is on the golden side of yellow, and so is less livid than a lot of other shades of yellow glass I've used.  It melts nicely without bubbling or boiling, and it doesn't pit or do other unpleasant things when you're working it. The reactions that Yellow has with other colours fall in with my expectations of the family of colours that includes Kelp, Straw Yellow, Light Brown Transparent, and Mojito.

In the leftmost bead here, you can see that the silver has darkened the Yellow significantly, and beaded up on the surface of the bead in a strange way.  In the bead on the right, encasing the silver has produced a blueish/greenish reaction in places, and you can see the darkened yellow through the gaps where there is no silver on the base bead.

For this bead, I made a base of Yellow, rolled it in silver foil and then encased with more Yellow. Underneath the encasement layer, the silver looks almost burgundy.  I expected it to turn a coppery colour the way it does with Straw Yellow, but I guess the more saturated nature of this Yellow yields a darker, richer result.

I got beautiful, vivid colour from my reducing silver glass frit on top of Yellow, and I also got decent colour from TerraNova 2.  The biggest, most exciting surprise that Yellow gave me was what happened in the rightmost bead.  I did not expect this colour to work this way as silver glass frit stringer, but it not only worked but has amazing striations in it and beautiful blues and greens.

To make the bead furthest to the right, I melted a big blob of Yellow on the end of a rod, and then dipped it in my reducing silver glass frit blend.  I melted that in and re-dipped it a couple of times and then pulled it out into stringer.  I used that to encase a core of Yellow, and then without reducing it, encased the resulting bead with Clear.  I love this effect a lot.

Copper Green behaves a little oddly with Yellow.  When I used Yellow on top of it, a light line formed around most of the Yellow dots and stringer lines, and the Copper Green developed a sort of mottled, pinkish look to it.  When I used Copper Green on top of Yellow, it got pretty dark and seemed to pit more than usual.  Tuxedo on top of Yellow seemed more translucent than I am accustomed to it being.  Apart from those things, I didn't notice much else of interest in these beads.

And here is the Yellow goddess.  She shows how rich this colour is when used alone in a sculptural piece. I will post some more sample beads when I come back to this colour, although I am not sure when that will be.