Test Results :: Summer Haze / Lemongrass

CiM Summer Haze (CiM321) and CiM Lemongrass (CiM320) are essentially the same colour, except that Lemongrass is a little more opaque. They work up a gorgeous, smokey lemon yellow. The glass in these test beads is Summer Haxe, but there are beads with both Lemongrass and Summer Haze towards the end of this post. Because these colours are essentially the same formula according to CiM, I only did the colour test with one of them but I am sure that there are some subtle differences.

Reducing Summer Haze didn't really alter its colour. It might have gotten a bit darker, but I also need to remember that it is a smaller bead on a dark background, which probably explains the colour difference in the two beads above all by itself.

Silver develops a slight 'mistiness' on top of Summer Haze, and when the silver is reduced and encased it shows some areas with blue halos under the encasement layer When you use Summer Haze over silver foil, the foil turns bright gold. This means that Summer Haze has interesting potential as a base colour for silver glass frit stringer.

Summer Haze is an unusually good base colour for silver glass. My reducing silver glass and striking silver glass both really bloomed on top of it.

Summer Haze is not a very reactive colour, but it did cause separation in Opal Yellow, Ivory, Peace, and Copper Green in my test beads.

Here are some other beads made with Lemongrass and Summer Haze.

Lemongrass

Lemongrass

Summer Haze

Test Results :: Troi

CiM Troi (CiM558) is a vibrant medium teal opaque. It reminds me of Mermaid, only a bit lighter and bluer.

I was a little unprepared for how vibrant it would be, because the rod colour is a little more subdued than this colour ends up being after working and annealing it. It's quite a streaky colour, leaving little trails and veins of darker teal all through it no matter how carefully you work.

Like many other colours in the turquoise/teal families, you can get a brick red reduction on Troi. You sort of have to work at it, though, and the result I got was blotchy. I tried a variety of strengths of reduction flame, and a variety of flame-height positions while reducing this and was not able to achieve an even coverage. Maybe you'll have better luck?

The reason Troi's vibrance surprised me so much is that in rod form, Troi is almost exactly the same colour as Quetzal. However, after working Troi gets darker, and Quetzal must get a bit bluer because they are nothing alike after coming out of the kiln.

Troi reacts predictably with silver. Silver leaf only seems to turn this odd shade of mustard when it is reduced and encased on teal glass. I really like how the silver leaf coalesced in the veins where the Troi separated from itself in the leftmost bead.

My striking silver glass frit in the bead on the right developed some interesting colour.

On top of Troi, Copper Green and Opal Yellow both separate.

Ivory and Troi develop a reciprocal dark line reaction, and the reaction is so strong that it discolours the stringer line's interior as well as its edges. When Troi is on top of Ivory, the brown line creeps into the Ivory in varying amounts.

Troi separates on top of everything because it's so streaky.


Here are some other beads that contain Troi:

Test Results :: Black Marble

Effetre Black Marble (EFF774) is a streaky, dark brown-black colour that has the same consistency as Effetre Dark Ivory. Also like Dark Ivory, it does a crazy reticulation thing that looks like little cells of different shades of brown and ivory in between veins of darker colour. It's in this glass' reactions to other colours where some big differences lie.

On a bit of a side note, this colour does not look like marble, and it is also not really black. It's more of a 'rich farmland soil' kind of dark, streaky brown.

Black Marble doesn't really change much when it is reduced. It's possible that the bead on the right got a bit darker, but it's hard to be sure since this colour has so much variation anyway.

Here I did Black Marble as stringer (wrapped about three times) on the left side of the bead and then the same amount of Silvered Black Marble on the right side. The silvered stringer is darker overall (my best guess is that the silver reacted with whatever ivory-like glass forms the lighter streaks?) and has tiny flecks of silver in it that make me happy. I made the Silvered Black Marble the same way I make Silvered Dark Ivory.

I sort of expected this colour to behave the same way with silver as light and dark ivory glasses do, but I was wrong. The silver leaf on the surface of this colour is a more interesting light golden hue. When I reduced and encased the silver, the golden-ness went away and it blushed blue in places which I have not had it do with ivory glasses.

Silver glass is very beautiful on top of Black Marble, which seems to make a decent base colour for both reducing and striking colors.

Black Marble has a much milder version of the same reaction profile as Ivory - which is to say that it does a gentle dark line reaction with Copper Green, and it is also gently reactive with Opal Yellow. Because both colours are spready, you can see where Ivory and Black Marble were used together that there is some interesting bleed at the edges of the stringer dots and lines.

My most important takeaway from these beads is that Black Marble is really awesome as stringer.

Here are some other beads that include Black Marble: