Test Results :: Ginger

CiM Ginger (CiM701) is a pretty, soft peachy-pink opaque colour. It is fairly inert - it will fume and discolour with silver, but in a much milder way than other neutral colours like Ivory.

Ginger doesn't change colour when you reduce it. You can see in the bead on the right that Ginger can be a bit streaky. In that bead, a lot of the colour migrated to the middle of the bead when I was melting it down.

Silver fumes the surface of Ginger slightly, giving it a yellowish cast. If you reduce and encase the silver leaf with Effetre Super Clear it turns an interesting, ethereal, lacy white with blue and pink halo effects under the clear.

It also, sadly, cracked in this test bead, so if you will be using this colour with silver and encasing it with clear, make a test bead or two first to see if this crack was because of that combination or if it was my fault.

Ginger is an average base for silver glass. My reducing silver glass bits spread out on top of the Ginger, and it stayed pretty neutral under the silver glass. I got a lackluster starting strike from my TerraNova2 frit. It seems from looking back at my notes for CiM Butter Pecan Uniques #4 and #5 that Ginger is significantly less reactive with silver than either of those colours were.

I'm looking forward to having worked all the way through this bluish batch of Tuxedo that I still have so much of. Ginger separates and thins out on top of Tuxedo, but the only reason the Tuxedo looks blue on the leftmost bead here is because this particular batch of Tuxedo was less opaque than usual.

Copper Green and Ginger don't strongly react, but you can see a defined outline around my Copper Green stringer work if you zoom in. It's not a dark line reaction like with Ivory, it's more like the Copper Green is floating just on top of the Ginger on some thin transparent layer. Ginger separates a bit on top of Copper Green.

On top of Ivory, Ginger blushes a darker colour at its edges, but there is no strong reaction between Ginger and Opal Yellow, Ivory, or Peace.

Here are some other beads that contain Ginger.

Test Results :: Lotis

Double Helix Lotis is a beautiful middle pink colour. It has gorgeous smoothness and clarity, and is not difficult to strike at all.

The larger the amount of Lotis in one place, the darker it looks.

Lotis is pinker, brighter, and lighter than Rubino Oro and Pink Lady, the other two pinks I had on hand to test it with.

In spite of it being a lighter pink, Lotis is still powerful in a handmixed colour. Here, I've paired it with one of the Double Helix semi-transparent whites for a beautiful, semi-opaque pink without much dilution of its colour.

Lotis is a bit reactive with silver, turning it a smokey, yellowish grey colour with blue fume around its edges. When the silver is reduced and encased, it looks lacier and the yellow goes away.

Lotis makes a pretty base colour for silver glass. I got a beautiful starting strike in my TerraNova2 frit.

Although Lotis is reactive with silver, it is mostly inert with these other colours I use for testing. Apart from a slight tendency for Copper Green to separate when used next to it, there isn't much to report about these beads.

Test Results :: American Beauty

It has taken me a long time to get around to using my American Beauty (EFF643). This Effetre "cool colour" is strange in the rod, looking more like a cloudy red filigrana than a streaky red transparent.

I liked this colour much more than I thought I would because the paddle pictures that are displayed for it at most online vendors make it look truly hideous. My core takeaway from these test beads? Try everything. The paddle colours unfortunately tell us almost nothing about a colour.

American Beauty is unfazed by a bit of reduction.

On top of American Beauty, silver crusts up and turns a patchy blue. When the silver is reduced and encased, the blue is more evident.

Silver Glass is really pretty on top of American Beauty. I got good results from both my reducing colours and my striking colours. The reactions are more subtle and the colours are much more vibrant than what I got performing the same tests with Striking Red.

American Beauty is not very reactive. I got a little fuzziness in my Ivory stringer dots and lines on top of it, but that's it.

Here are some other beads made with American Beauty.