Test Results :: Crocus

CiM Crocus is a light, bright, semi-opaque lavender. I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to try it, but I've really enjoyed my adventures with semi-opaques this year -- I love the translucency and the reactivity of almost every single semi-opaque colour I have tried, and this one has been no exception.

Crocus is not very reactive, making it a both beautiful and stable colour to use in my designs. Someone told me when I started using this colour to watch out because they had incompatibility problems with Crocus, but I did not experience any problems that way at all, whether I encased the Crocus or not. I did find some of the rods a bit shocky, but not in any serious 'want to throw it across the room and forget it's name' kind of way.

Here we have Crocus, au-naturel. Reduced, unreduced, it's all the same. I also didn't find that I got much colour change or opacification from Crocus when I repeatedly heated it, which was nice since it happens a lot with other semi-opaques.

Crocus does not seem to be very reactive with Silver. The silver spreads out and basically just looks like a fine silver crust on top of Crocus, and when you reduce and encase the silver on top of Crocus you get a silvery, snowy blanket look.  Silver does not affect the colour of Crocus much in my test beads, above.

However, when I used my reducing silver glass frit on top of Crocus and reduced it, the Crocus turned an odd colour of grey. I'm not sure if this was because of reactions with the frit, the reduction, or if the colour change is a mix of reactivity with the frit and reduction, but it's a dramatic difference.  In the rightmost bead, my TerraNova2 went reddish purple which is the first striking step. This means to me that I could probably get decent colours with striking silver glass on top of Crocus if I worked at it a little.

In terms of reactions, I didn't observe that much with Crocus.

Copper green didn't go grungy when used underneath Crocus, which to me means that something in the Crocus helped to keep it clean. On top of Crocus, Copper Green separates and the edges of my dots and stringer lines turned an odd greyish pink colour.

There were also some very minor separation reactions in Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace when used on top of Crocus, but the separation was so minor that I'm not counting those in my overall reaction index.

Here are some beads that include CiM Crocus: