Test Results :: Cranberry

CiM Cranberry is a deep, rich fuschia colour and a nice, dense transparent pink.  Deciding whether I prefer this colour or if I prefer Effetre Rubino Oro is sort of difficult, because I like them both for different reasons.  I will talk about some of the similarities and differences as we move down through my test beads.

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ Silver Foil, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 8 & 9 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, Peace

Cranberry is a deeper, richer colour than Rubino Oro -- or at least, this particular batch of Cranberry is/was deeper and richer in colour than the batch of Rubino Oro that I had back in 2012 when I made my Rubino Oro test beads.

Silver does fascinating things on top of Cranberry. You can see in the bead on the left how the silver has gone green and yellow and brown on top of it. In the right-most bead, you can see how the silver foil I sandwiched between two layers of cranberry has turned a vivid pinkish orange colour.

The first bead where I melted silver leaf into the surface resulted in the same green/yellow/brown reaction that I got with Rubino, but in the second bead where I reduced and encased the silver, the silver stayed much more 'silver' than it did when I performed the same test with Rubino.  It is possible that I may have used a different clear, though, so I will try to do a better job of keeping track of that in future. In the Rubino Oro bead, the silver turned pink and yellow under the encasement.

I don't think that encasing Cranberry is an especially good idea.  The bead in the middle has cranberry, then a layer of silver leaf, and then was reduced and encased with Clear. It has cracked right down the middle.

In these beads, you can see what an interesting base colour cranberry is for silver glass. Both my reducing and striking silver glass frit got all interesting on top of this colour. I got beautiful, vivid colour from the TerraNova2 frit in the bead on the right, and in the bead on the left, the reducing silver glass frit developed interesting separation lines and halos and also left some blue fume on the surface of the Cranberry.

When I did these tests with Rubino Oro, I got funny brownish gunkiness around the edges of my reduction frit, and the colours in both test beads were much more washed-out looking, although the TerraNova2 frit got good colour on top of Rubino as well.

So, this picture is a bit confusing because I stupidly put the colours on the bead in the wrong order in the bead on the right, mixing up the placement of Opal Yellow and Ivory. Since I made these beads and took these pictures sometime last year, I don't still have the beads lying around to take another picture, so you will need to use your imagination to see things in the right order. It is in the bead on the right that the order is screwed up.

Tuxedo didn't react with the Cranberry or vice versa.

Cranberry caused my Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace to separate when I used those colours on top of it to make stringer dots and lines.

In addition to separating Ivory, Cranberry also turns it brown, although sort of differently from how I experienced this reaction with Rubino Oro. While in my Rubino test results, Rubino turned brownish on top of Ivory, when I used Cranberry on top of Ivory I got dramatic dark, brownish black splotches that took over that part of the bead. In my Rubino test results, when I used Ivory on top of Rubino, the Ivory went completely brown. With Cranberry, only the edges of the Ivory turned brown, and in a kind've neat, fuzzy, watercolour way.

Using Copper Green and Opal Yellow underneath Cranberry stringer dots and lines caused the base glass to pop up in halos around the Cranberry. Like with Rubino, the Cranberry spreads out on top of these colours, however it does not thin out as much as Rubino so the effect is not as subtle.

I didn't get the same kind of popping halo effect with Peace, which would have surprised me more if I hadn't already had that same result with Rubino Oro.

This is an appalling bead, because it got stuck to something else in the kiln and has gouges in the belly, however it demonstrates very nicely the richness of this colour. You can sort of see in the breasts that the colour is blueish, and I'm not sure what caused this. It is more pronounced in person and has a weird, cloudy quality to it.  It happened on both the breasts and on her butt (not shown) and the only thing I can think of is that those places on her got a little less striking than the rest of the sculpture did.

Test Results :: Mosaic Green

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 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

Effetre Mosaic Green is another crazy colour. I seem to be writing up test results for quite a few of those lately.

Mosaic Green is a pure dark green. You can't really get greener than this colour. I'm a little confused about whether it's an opaque or a transparent, because it has a transparent colour number and is sold at Frantz as a transparent, but I have also seen it sold as an opaque colour (on Delphi's website, for one) and it seems not transparent at all to me when I use it. When pulled out into stringer, it's very transparent (but DARK), although as you can see, it is not transparent in any of these test beads.

You can see in the self-coloured spacer on the left that Mosaic Green is a crazily streaky, mottling colour. When Mosaic Green is reduced, all of the bits between the dark streaks develop a rich red copper patina.

When Silver Leaf is melted into the surface of Mosaic Green, it just kinda disappears, except for some silvery bits that seem to get stuck in the 'cracks' formed by the mottled webbing of the surface. When the silver is reduced and encased, it goes a weird blueish grey colour, in a lacy, low-surface-coverage kind of way.

Silver Glass is not particularly effective on top of Mosaic Green, although the results are sort of interesting. My reducing silver glass frit has been somewhat swallowed by the Mosaic Green so there's not much left on the surface, but for the frit that IS left on the surface, an interesting separation has occured so that the edges of the frit are far lighter than the middles of each little bit. My TerraNova2 frit struck to blue on top of Mosaic Green, but the Mosaic Green so aggressively swallowed so much of it that it's not all that evident.

On top of Tuxedo, Mosaic Green separates so that it is lighter and more opaque around the edges, and is dark and seems completely transparent in the middle of the stringer lines. This might just be an illusion because it's on black and Mosaic Green is so dark, but it's odd. Tuxedo doesn't do much on top of Mosaic Green, although the Mosaic Green underneath it in the bead on the right looks more crazily mottled than it does under either Copper Green or Opal Yellow.

Copper Green separates on top of Mosaic Green, and the separation is a lot like what it does on top of EDP, Sedona, Steel Blue, Olive, Cocoa, Flamingo, Opal Raspberry (and I'm sure I'm missing some), but there is a slight difference. The dark line in the centre of the Copper Green lines and the dots in the middle of the Copper Green dots are more of an intense blue colour than they are turquoise, and they are also super thin/small. The edges of the Copper Green stringer work look almost frayed, because of the Mosaic Green bleeding into them.

When Mosaic Green is used on top of Copper Green, a light turquoise halo pops up around the Mosaic Green stringer lines, and a darker turquoise veining remains underneath, looking kind've like grout. The Mosaic Green separates so that a dark line runs down its centre, less dramatically than with Tuxedo but still pretty intensely.

Opal Yellow on top of Mosaic Green is a pretty similar story to what I just explained about the Copper Green reaction, except that the Opal Yellow takes on a lot of the Mosaic Green colour. You can see around the edges of the Opal Yellow stringer work that there has been a crazy amount of bleeding and almost all of the yellow has some level of green contamination. Also, the line down the middle of the Opal Yellow stringer work looks black rather than blue. When Mosaic Green is used on top of Opal Yellow, the Opal Yellow rises up around it in self-coloured halos, and the Mosaic Green bleeds into it.

When Ivory stringer work is done on top of Mosaic Green, it doesn't develop a dark line reaction. It just turns a dark brownish black completely. When Mosaic Green is used on top of Ivory, all of the Mosaic Green stringer lines and dots are surrounded by a dark brown miasma, that sort of reminds me of what happens in SimCity when your industrial buildings cause ground pollution.

In order to not repeat myself too much, I'm going to cheat and say that Peace reacts with Mosaic Green in almost the exact same way as Opal Yellow when it is used on top of Mosaic Green. However, when Mosaic Green is used on top of Peace, it doesn't really get those cool raised 'halos' that the Opal Yellow gets, and the Mosaic Green bleeds into it a lot. So much that the edges of the dots and stringer lines are sort of hard to look at because of their neon green-ness.

Mosaic Green is unexpectedly beautiful in sculptural work. It looks like Malachite in my goddess bead.

Test Results :: Opal Raspberry

Reichenbach Opal Raspberry (RL6219) is a bright, dark pink colour. It might be the only consistent dark pink opaque colour in our palette that doesn't devitrify like my dog's life depends on it. It's also a really odd colour, both in terms of behaviour on its own and reactions with other colours. The reactions are a lot like the reactions I've observed from Sedona, EDP, Rubino Oro and Reichenbach Flamingo, so there's a whole category of pink and purple colours that are this strange.

In the bead on the left, you can see how Opal Raspberry mottles and streaks and develops separation lines with itself that look almost like cracks in the surface of the bead, although that's just an illusion. In the bead on the right, I reduced the Opal Raspberry resulting in a dark burgandy, shiny reduction film. The mottled surface of the bead shows through the reduction film - you can see it in the middle of the bead.

When silver leaf is melted into the surface of Opal Raspberry, it turns the pink to a vivid shade of yellowish orange. The silver settles into veins on the surface of the bead. When the bead is reduced and encased, the silver forms an interesting, lacy pattern over the discoloured Opal Raspberry. You can see its yellowish orangeness peeking through the 'holes' in the silvery lace coating under the clear.

Opal Raspberry is a beautiful base for silver glass colours, both striking and reducing. In the bead on the left, I got beautiful shine and variation from my reducing silver glass frit, and then in the bead on the right my TerraNova2 frit has struck to blues and greens very nicely.

Reaction-wise, quite a lot is going on in these beads.

When Opal Raspberry is used on top of Tuxedo, it looks not quite opaque and develops separation lines in the centre of dots and lines that are sort of messy in appearance.

On top of Opal Raspberry, Copper Green separates into a lighter and a darker, brighter version of itself. This is the same as the reaction Copper Green has to Lauscha Cocoa, Lauscha Steel Blue, Lauscha Cocoa, Effetre EDP, Effetre Sedona, and Reichenbach Flamingo, to name a few. When Opal Raspberry is used on top of Copper Green it separates the Copper Green underneath it so that a lighter line appears directly around the pink but then the darker, vivid turquoise remains between the dots and stringer lines. This reaction is not quite as attractive as the reaction with, say, EDP because the Opal Raspberry does not thin out enough around the Copper Green and lose enough of its opacity to really make the reaction work.

On top of Opal Raspberry, Opal Yellow takes on a decidedly orange appearance, especially around its edges. The separation lines that Opal Raspberry gets here are around the edge of the Opal Yellow instead of just down the middle, resulting in a sort of three-dimensional illusion of a crack wandering around the edges of some of the stringer work and a divot appearing in the centre of my dots. When Opal Raspberry is used on top of Opal Yellow, it causes the Opal Yellow to separate from itself and instead of the crack-like appearance, it looks rather like the base bead of Opal Yellow had a dot of clear and then another dot of Opal Yellow on top of it underneath my Opal Raspberry dots.

Ivory develops a serious dark black-brown line around it on top of Opal Raspberry. When Opal Raspberry is used on top of Ivory, because the Opal Raspberry is not completely opaque the entire line takes on a brownish purple appearance with smears of pink wandering around on top of it.

With Peace, the reactions are much less evident. When Peace is used on top of Opal Raspberry, it develops faint separation lines in the stringer work. When Opal Raspberry is used on top of Peace, it thins out to a semi-opaque appearance in an uneven, mottled way.

Here are some fun beads with Opal Raspberry. I had a bit of a fingerpainting session when I tested this glass, wanting to see if anything good would come of using Opal Raspberry in place of the EDP in the classic OY/EDP/CG reaction. Those beads also have some Periwinkle in them.

The goddess is self-coloured Opal Raspberry. Opal Raspberry is weird glass, but pretty!

Test Results :: Sedona

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 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

Effetre Sedona is a temperamental, dusky pink that has occasional tendencies towards lavender. It is a blotchy, organic, beautiful colour.

Sedona has a tendency to devitrify. Like Effetre Purple (Evil Devitrifying Purple, or EDP), the secret to staying free of the devit is to get the bead glowing hot and then not heat it again. It's the incremental heating and cooling that are a real problem for these colours. I learned from Kimberly Affleck that you can also kill the devit on Sedona by lightly reducing the bead in a dragon's breath flame, which is a strong, no-oxygen flame, but I'm a wuss and I don't like turning my torch that high, so I rarely bother. I sort of like the devit, so I'm figuring out ways to make it work for me.

Try making a bead with Sedona and letting it get a really disgusting amount of devitrification. To maximize the amount of devitrification, gently re-heat and cool the Sedona bead at least five times. Then, when you think you've probably made the absolute ugliest thing ever, encase it completely with Light Aqua, melt in the encasement layer and then stick it in the kiln. Let me know what you think.

Sedona in its natural state ranges anywhere from a deep dusty rose, to a hot pink, to a pinkish lavender. You never quite know what you're going to get with Sedona. When you reduce Sedona, it turns a shiny dark purple.

Where I have added silver leaf to the Sedona, it has developed oily-looking black webbing, and has also blushed a strange orangey pink colour. Around the edges, it has yellowed. When the silver leaf is reduced and encased, a lot more yellow is evident, as well as a livid lavender colour.

Adding reducing silver glass frit to Sedona and then reducing it is not a very attractive path to go down. The silver glass frit turns a dead mustardy colour, and all around it the Sedona reduces to a dark purple. Ugh. On the other hand, Sedona is brilliant as a base for striking silver glass, if you don't mind how the Sedona gets a little orange around the frit. My TerraNova2 frit here has bloomed beautifully.

Sedona is one of the more reactive colours I've tested, and the reactions are almost identical to those I got with EDP. Copper Green, Opal Yellow and Peace all separate on top of Sedona. When Sedona is used on top of Copper Green, Opal Yellow and Peace, the base colour rises up around the Sedona in halos.

There is a reciprocal orangey reaction between Opal Yellow and Sedona - Opal Yellow on top of Sedona looks a richer, deeper yellow than usual, with a tint of Orange. Sedona on top of Opal Yellow seems to spread a little and take on an orangey hue. This reminds me of the reaction between Opal Yellow and Rubino Oro.

Ivory blackens when used with Sedona, developing a webby dark line reaction. When the Ivory is used on top of Sedona, The reaction is densely contained within the Ivory stringer dots and lines, but when Sedona is used on top of Ivory, the reaction is much less localized, and spreads like wildfire.

On top of both Tuxedo and Ivory, Sedona looks far more purple than it does pink.

Here are some fun beads with Sedona.

  

Test Results :: Rubino Oro

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 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 and Peace

Effetre Rubino Oro is a rich, medium to dark pink transparent colour, and is extremely reactive. It's a striking colour, which means that it is generally clear when first melted, and then strikes to its rich, pink hue through repeated heating and cooling.

Rubino Oro is a colour that is persnickety about how much heat it gets and how oxygenated the flame is that it is heated in. Too little oxygen can result in the Rubino Oro getting ugly, dark streaks in it. Too much heat can result in the colour getting burnt out  of it.

I have read reports that Rubino Oro does not like to be encased and can cause cracking, however I did not experience that problem with my particular batch of it. I did find that my batch was sort of streaky though, and that the colour is not very uniform. This is most visible in my first plain spacer in the picture above, and on the quint-coloured bead that has the Rubino Oro stringer decoration on top of it.

Reducing Rubino Oro results in a dark grey-pink shiny patina developing on the surface of the bead.

Silver leaf on top of Rubino Oro turns dark grey and a strange mustardy brown. When the silver is reduced and encased, this effect lightens considerably and the silver develops pinkish patches and odd green halo effects. The reaction is actually sort of attractive, if you can get the silver to uniformly cover the Rubino before reducing and encasing it (which I didn't).

Rubino Oro is not particularly attractive with reducing silver glass frit. You can see here that it has leeched most of the colour out of my frit blend and turned a yucky brownish colour around the edges. I think that it's the reduction that causes this, because the silver glass frit in the bead on the right (unreduced TerraNova2) is far more attractive. I didn't do my frit stringer test with Rubino Oro, which now seems like a sort of giant oversight. I guess I can put it on the huge, growing to-do list.

Rubino Oro brought out very nice colour in the TN2 frit, and seems to make a pretty good base for striking silver glass.

Tuxedo didn't really seem to react with the Rubino Oro or vice versa, but it is the exception, not the rule.

Rubino caused my Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace to separate when I used those colours on top of it to make stringer dots and lines. In addition to separating Ivory, Rubino also turns it brown.

Using Copper Green and Opal Yellow underneath Rubino Oro stringer dots and lines caused the base glass to pop up in halos around the Rubino. I love this effect. It is extra weird in the Opal Yellow because the Opal Yellow changes the colour of Rubino Oro from pink to orange. I didn't get the same kind of popping halo effect with Peace, which sort of surprised me.

On top of Ivory, Rubino Oro is just sort of a smeary brown mess.

Here is a bead where I layered Rubino Oro over Ivory as the bead base colours. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it definitely has provided some contrast.

Test Results :: EDP (Evil Devitrifying Purple)

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 6 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ Peace



Effetre Purple, most commonly known as Evil Devitrifying Purple (EDP), is a very strange colour. The reactions with EDP and other colours are strikingly similar to the reactions I got with Reichenbach Flamingo. This is a very reactive colour. It is also a very frustrating colour because of its tendency to devitrify, turning matte and white in odd ways and places.

What I think I've discovered about working with EDP is that it is important to work it hot, and to not let it cool too much before finishing the bead. Cooling the surface of the bead -- by waiting outside the flame, by pressing -- and then reheating it seems to be what caused me the most devitrification headache. Keeping the bead pretty hot and cooling it only once, at the end on it's way to the kiln, is what helped me keep the devitrification off of these test beads. Where I did get some, I reheated the bead and got rid of it and put the bead away fast before my luck changed.

I find that when I work on large focals with EDP or Sedona (it devitrifies too *sigh*) that I usually just end up either etching or encasing the bead because I get discouraged once the bead is well and truly devitrified. I learned from Kimberly Affleck that you can reduce the devit off in a dragon's breath flame, but sometimes I don't really want to reduce my bead, and as you will see below, reducing EDP can have some unpleasant effects.

Here we have two plain spacers made from EDP. The one on the left is a rich purple with hints of blue. The one on the right was reduced, and is now a shiny, brownish purple. I did not know that EDP did this when it was reduced, so it was an interesting surprise.

EDP and silver don't really seem to like each other very much. You can see in the bead on the left how the EDP has sort of gone haywire under the silver, getting all pink and yellow. The silver leaf on top of the EDP has a strange greenish orange cast to it. When the silver is subsequently reduced and encased, almost every interesting thing that silver and EDP do together is no longer evident, the silver just looking like a dirty white shell over the mottled purple core of the bead.

Here, in the bead on the left, the EDP has turned almost all of the reduction fritty bits yellow. Underneath the frit, the EDP has turned pinkish and yellow (from the silver) and brown (from the reduction). In the bead on the right, my TerraNova2 frit sort of stubbornly refused to strike, and all around it, the EDP has turned pink and coral.

On top of Tuxedo, EDP looks blue and cloudy.

EDP makes copper green separate into two different colours of turquoise, and seems to prevent the copper green from getting that greyish sheen. The EDP is sort of mottled in this bead, looking like itself in some places and looking bluer and cloudier in others. This is an awesome reaction, and if you are familiar with the classic EDP/Copper Green/Opal Yellow colour combination and are looking for other colours that will work, I'd start by looking for other colours that do this to Copper Green. 

A few opaque colours that I have found so far that have this kind of dramatic reaction include Lauscha Olive, Lauscha Steel Blue, Lauscha Cocoa, CiM Rainforest and Reichenbach Flamingo. Of course, I have not tested them in combination with both Copper Green and Opal Yellow, so I don't know what the final result would look like, but these all seem like they'd be good ones to experiment with.

This is the yellowest yellow I have ever achieved with Opal Yellow, although Opal Yellow has behaved strangely with all of the same colours that have made Copper Green go crazy. In this bead, the EDP is a mottled pink and purple, and has formed a sort of pinkish brown line between itself and the Opal Yellow. The Opal Yellow, apart from being a lot yellower than I would have thought on the left-hand side of the bead, has also separated and developed purple dots in the centres of its dots where I've put it on top of EDP. Fun!

Weirdness with Ivory, again in almost exactly the same way Reichenbach Flamingo was weird with Ivory, turning it black. EDP looks sort of blueish on top of the blackened Ivory, in the same cloudy way that it looked blue on top of Tuxedo. The Ivory lines and dots on top of EDP look black, but in a strange pencil-lead kind of way that makes them look sketched on instead of painted on.

On top of Peace, EDP looks almost pink, and spreads a little. Peace on top of EDP separates, and all of the dots and stringer lines get a dark, translucent purple centre.

Here are some fun beads with EDP.

  

 

In all of the crunched beads, I used a cane that I made from EDP, Light Turquoise, Celadon and Iris Dense Blue. All of the orange you see in the beads is from a reaction between the EDP and Iris Dense Blue. The unencased bead (bottom left) devitrified pretty heavily, but you can't see any devit in the two beads I encased, and I rather like the resulting mottledness.

Test Results :: Flamingo

1 - Plain, 2 - Reduced, 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Blend (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ White

General Impressions
Reichenbach Flamingo (RL6218) is beautiful, interesting and I think somewhat challenging to use. It's going to take me some time to really figure out how I want to deal with this colour. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Effetre Sedona, which I have not tested properly yet, only without the devitrification.  Flamingo has its own issues though, as you will see.

In the rod, Flamingo is brown. I spent quite a bit of time staring at it and wondering about it before finally adding it to my palette, and had a long (and probably tedious) conversation with Holly about how unflamingo-like it seemed before I ever melted any.

Depending on what you use it with, it ranges from a dark dusty rose (i.e. Bead #10) to a dark pink with orange overtones (Bead #1) and then down the darkness scale to more medium tones of those colours and the colours in between. It changes colour with silver, not always for the better, and it is really, really reactive. It gets mucky like Rubino Oro if you overheat it (or have a little too much propane -- not sure here). Also like Rubino Oro and many of the Italian pinks, it doesn't play nice with Ivory AT ALL.  More on this in a minute.

Something went wrong (not sure what  yet) when I encased Flamingo with the new Double Helix Terra2, added some Double Helix CE352 and then encased it with Aether. There are compatibility cracks all through the bead. Either the Flamingo doesn't much like being deeply encased, it doesn't much like being combined with a lot of silver glass, or something less obvious is going on. This made me particularly sad because I got such great colour out of the Terra2 and the CE352, but it was sort of lopsided anyway, so maybe this is for the best.  *sigh*

I hope I don't have to lose too many beads before I figure out what the problem is. I'm leaning toward the deep encasement explanation for now, because this colour is very similar in other respects to the Italian pinks, which also don't really take kindly to being encased.

Overall, though, I am pretty intrigued. I'm hoping the weather holds up this weekend so that I can get some torch time in and play with it some more.

Reduction

One of the coolest, weirdest things about Flamingo is that when you reduce it, it goes a shiny dark pink. This reduction film is exactly like the reduction film you get on a silver glass like Triton, apart from the fact that it is pink. I've never seen a colour do this before, so I am totally in awe of it. The whole thing was sort of marred by the fact that for some unknown reason, the whole bead reduced except for a thin line down the middle. Not sure why that happened, really, or if it will happen again.

Reactions

Putting silver leaf on Flamingo was sort of a different experience. First of all, the silver made a really decided beeline for the middle of the bead, and second of all, it totally turned the bead a strange shade of orange. When I reduced and encased the silver in the bead on the right, the result is really interesting -- kind've mottled and lacy and weird. I used Effetre Clear for this test.

Silver Glass really likes Flamingo, so I'm hoping that it doesn't turn out that Flamingo is a silver-glass-hating colour.

I didn't get great colour out of my TerraNova2 frit, but it didn't completely tank either. The pink in the bead of the left is a beautiful colour that unlike in most of the other beads, is actually reminiscent of flamingos. Nothing looked flamingo-like when it went into the kiln, so I spent the seven hours waiting for my annealing cycle to finish up worrying that because there are no flamingos in Germany, the people at Reichenbach had named it without ever looking at one.  Sorry about that :)

In the bead on the right, the silver glass frit has vivid halos around each piece, which is cool all by itself. Even cooler, but not so visible in the picture because it didn't photograph very well, the Flamingo reduced right along with the silver glass and the whole surface of the bead is mirrored, some places with pink and some places with greens and blues. So neat.

There is no bleeding between Flamingo and Tuxedo, but the Flamingo does have a decidedly more yellowish hue on the right-hand side of this bead. Also, where the Flamingo is over the Tuxedo, it looks much paler than in the other beads, is semi-transparent and has developed a translucent line/dot in the middle of the stringerwork designs.

Flamingo is totally cool with Copper Green. The reactions here are so crazy they are not easy to describe accurately.

On the Copper Green side of the bead, the Flamingo has separated over the Copper Green so that it is yellow on the outside and pink in the middle. You can see some dark bits on the Flamingo where I overheated it, possibly with too much propane in my flame.

On the Flamingo side of the bead, the Copper Green has also separated, light and shiny on the outside of the reaction and dark in the middle, but in addition, a thin yellowish line has formed around it so that there are three layers of reactive effect.

Flamingo makes Opal Yellow angry. The Opal Yellow on the Flamingo side of the bead blackened a little in the middle of the dots and lines, turning almost sooty. I did not expect this since Opal Yellow never, ever does things like this. It also curdled and separated.

On the Opal Yellow side of the bead, the Flamingo totally spread out and went orangey and there is some blackening both in AND around those lines.

I'm not sure what to make of this really... I think I need to try it again with a cooler flame to really be sure what's going on here, but it's pretty interesting (if a little ugly).

Flamingo made Opal Yellow angry, but that was nothing compared to the black rage it caused in the Ivory. On the Ivory side of this bead, the Flamingo dots and lines look almost frayed. They're greyed out and the edges are jagged and the whole effect looks a little like dirty watercolours.

On the Flamingo side of the bead, the Ivory dots and lines have a dark outline that is wider than the Ivory that was allowed to survive the reaction.

The oddest thing about these two glasses together, though, has to be the weirdness in the middle.  The reaction is black and jagged, and it looks almost motion-blurred towards the Flamingo side, but it also seems to be emanating pink and purple smog.  I know there's a use for this reaction, I just need to figure out what that might be.

And finally, White separates and gets translucent in the middle when it's put on top of Flamingo. Flamingo looks slightly translucent and a touch more orange when you put it over white, and spreads a bit. You can even see in one place where the centre of a large area of Flamingo seems to have tried to BE white. There is some sooting of the Flamingo here as well.

I made a few beads with Flamingo, some of which I've already shown with other test results, but here they are again. More to come as I give Flamingo a few more workouts.