Test Results :: Light Lemon Yellow

Effetre Light Lemon Yellow is a beautiful, bright yellow opal. I call it an opal rather than a pastel/opaque, because it is transparent when pulled out into stringer and used in thin layers. It's a bit of a pain because it is quite boily, so you need to be careful not to work this colour too hot.

Light Lemon Yellow does not change colour when you reduce it.

Silver develops a greyish crust on top of Light Lemon Yellow with blue haze throughout it in places. When the silver is reduced and encased, it loses some (but not all) of this interesting colour. This is fairly consistent with other colours in the ivory/red/orange/yellow family that contain sulfur.

Light Lemon Yellow is a surprisingly good base for silver glass.  The colour of it is not really that appealing with the silver glass colours, but I guess we can't have everything. These beads make me think of the Northern Pikes song 'Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face'.

Light Lemon Yellow and Copper Green develop a reciprocal dark line reaction. Apart from that, this colour did not react strongly with any of my other standard test colours.

This bead is Light Lemon Yellow swirled with my Firefly 104 CoE frit blend.

Test Results :: Venus

CiM Venus (CiM911) is meant to be a transparent coral, and I can see on the CiM page that some people had that experience with it, but for me this colour ended up a light peach rather than a coral and lost its pink blush while I was working it. Since I tend to work a little on the hot side, I'm guessing it is the blasty heat that kills the pink.

I found Venus quite difficult to work with. While I tend to struggle with a lot of the light transparent colours, this one was a real monster for me, bubbling no matter how high in the flame I tried to work with it. So, heat it slowly and carefully, and maybe you will have better luck than I did.

Silver leaf fumed blue for me on top of Venus, and when I encased Silver Foil with Venus it turned gold. Reducing and encasing silver leaf on top of Venus didn't yield anything particularly interesting - the silver turned a greyish colour with hints of blue here and there where there was a break in silver coverage.

I found Venus to be an unexpectedly nice base colour for silver glass. My reducing silver glass got all ethereal and billowy on top of this colour, and I got a pleasing starting strike from my TerraNova2 frit. My reduction frit stringer test was also moderately successful, with lots of swirling blues and turquoises.

Venus is not very reactive with other colours, although Copper Green and Opal Yellow both separate on top of it.

It does a similar thing over Copper Green to what I observed with Dark Lavender, really picking up any red streaks in the CG and showing quite deeply coloured on top of it. This is a fun effect that isn't really a reaction, and I am pondering ways to exploit it. I wonder if flowers made with Copper Green petals overdotted with Dark Lavender or Venus would be pretty?

I didn't have much interest in making additional beads with Venus after the way it misbehaved on me, but I still have almost a full rod and may revisit it in the next few weeks. If so, I'll come back and update with pictures.

Test Results :: Peridot

CiM Peridot is a pale spring green colour, and is like a paler version of CiM Mojito, and somewhat less yellow. It's a bit less reactive than Mojito, and is a pretty, unique addition to the 104 colour palette.

Here, you can see that Peridot doesn't change when you reduce it. In the leftmost beads, I got a fair number of scummy bubbles. Peridot does tend to scum and bubble when it gets hot, so it's important to work it on the cooler side.

Like other colours in this hue group, Peridot is quite reactive with silver. You can see in the leftmost bead that silver turned this colour an interesting colour of brown when used on the surface. When the silver was reduced and encased, that brownness is not in evidence and the silver seems to have dispersed itself uniformly all over the surface, forming a snowy blanket under the clear encasement layer.

Peridot turns silver a pretty golden colour when you use it to encase silver foil.

Peridot is a pretty base for reducing silver glass frit.  Peridot makes an average base colour for striking silver glass and does the fun silver glass frit stringer thing that I like to do with reactive transparents in a streaky blue way.

With other colours, Peridot is not particularly reactive. It's definitely not one of the colours that helps keep Copper Green clean,

Test Results :: Eel Grass

CiM Eel Grass (CiM456) is a beautiful medium forest green colour.  It is a little more muted and less yellow than CiM Slytherin. I think that it is more reminiscent of CiM Algae in colour, only lighter and much less reactive. It's a keeper.  I want more :)

Here's some Eel Grass sandwiched between CiM Algae and Effetre Pale Emerald.

Like Peat Moss, Eel Grass has a tendency to bubble a little as it is being worked.  This problem is exacerbated when you use it in stringer form. The boiling can be prevented by working cool, but I am less good at that than I'd like to be, so bubbles.

On top of Eel Grass, silver disperses and beads up. When the silver is reduced and encased in clear, it fumes a very pretty colour of blue. Eel Grass does not change the colour of silver when it is used to encase silver foil.

I knew that Eel Grass was probably not going to work well as reducing glass frit stringer before I made the leftmost bead here because the Eel Grass-encased silver foil round did not turn gold, but I tried it anyway.

My reducing silver glass frit and my TerraNova2 frit both took to this colour very well.  Now that I have tested a few of them, I'm thinking that transparent greens that are not reactive with silver pgenerally make good bases for silver glass. I had great results with Effetre Dark Grass Green (which you already know if you read this blog a lot because I can't seem to shut up about it), Effetre Sage Transparent, and CiM Slytherin as well before this one.

In the bead on the right, you can see that Eel Grass lightens significantly when used over other colours. It also appears to be one of the colours that keeps Copper Green a bit cleaner than it tends to stay on its own.

In terms of reactions, this colour is pretty mild.  The opaque colours I used on top of it separated, but that seems to be a pretty normal thing for them to do on top of a transparent and maybe not very remarkable at all, although I'll still log it as truth.

Here are some other beads involving Eel Grass:

Test Results :: Peat Moss

CiM Peat Moss (CiM452) is a rich, earthy olive green transparent colour. It is definitely unique in the 104 CoE palette, and I hope that we see more of both this and Eel Grass, my other favourite transparent from this lot of new CiM colours.

Peat Moss doesn't change much when you reduce it.

Here, I've compared Peat Moss against Effetre Olive and Effetre Light Grass Green.  As you can see, it is significantly more on the yellow side and a fair bit browner than both of those colours. I got a lot of bubbles in all of these colours, which is no doubt my own fault, but Peat Moss does seem to be a colour that likes to bubble, especially when it is used in stringer form. I think the key to avoiding these bubbles is to work slower and cooler, which I'll practice :)

On top of Peat Moss, my silver turned yellow in a thick crusty layer. When I encased a similar layer of silver with clear on top of Peat Moss, all of the silver turned white.

I think this is the test result that confused me the most.  In all of my previous tests, when I've encased silver foil with a transparent colour, it has either turned the silver golden OR left it a shiny silver under the colour layer. Peat Moss is the first colour that has effectively deadened the silver so that it has no shine at all.

On top of Peat Moss, my reducing silver glass developed very interesting colour and edges, leading me to believe that Peat Moss is a good colour to use with reducing silver glass.  My TerraNova2 frit didn't do anything remarkable - Peat Moss seems like it would be an average base colour for striking silver glass.

Here you can see that Peat Moss does interesting things when pulled into stringer with reducing silver glass frit. I was surprised to see that I got this result but that it did not turn my silver foil gold, since up until now there has been a strong correlation between those two behaviours.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace all separate on top of Peat Moss.  Also interesting, Copper Green didn't develop its customary greyish patina when worked with Peat Moss.

Here are a few beads made with Peat Moss:

Test Results :: Ivory Alabastro

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

Effetre Ivory Alabastro. You know that sound that vampires make in movies when light is shone on them?  That's the sound that I want to make now when I think about this colour. This one really fits 'Alabastards', the nickname generally used for this group of colours.

Adjectives to describe it?  Finicky, Shocky, Explosive, Boily, Vexing

It's too bad, because some of the reactions are really interesting, and it would be fun to explore them further. Except that it wouldn't be.  Grrr.

This picture is reminiscent of a polar bear in a snowstorm in that you will have to take my word that there are beads in it at all.  The reason they're so white is because this glass boils really easily, and the resulting white haze is permanent.

I made these beads first, and so I learned a little about how high in the flame I had to keep this colour. As a result, I had a bit better success with the remaining beads.  This helped me keep the colour from boiling, but between the slow melting and the shockiness, these beads took forever to make.

Ivory Alabastro seems to turn silver golden, which is sort of neat.

And the bead on the left really popped with the reducing silver glass frit.

In terms of reactions, the only things that were really interesting about Ivory Alabastro were the way it separated when used with Tuxedo and Copper Green,  If you look at the left-most bead, you can see the little halos around those two colours.

Here are the spacers I made from Ivory Alabastro, Dusty Rose Coral, and Effetre Very Cherry. I wouldn't have even made these, except that by the time I realized what I was in for, I had already made the cane and was too stubborn to waste it.

Test Results :: Leaky Pen

1 - Plain, 2 - Reduced, 3 - Over Clear, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf, 5 - w/ Silver glass frit (Gaia, Elektra, Nyx) - reduced, 6 - w/ Terra frit, 7 - w/ Seashell Swirl, 8 - w/ Ivory

CiM Leaky Pen is super-dark, and lots of other people have already written about that.  I've also already read quite a few reports about how Leaky Pen is very sparky and prone to boiling when worked hot, which has definitely been part of my own experience with it. That means that this might be a relatively short post, which isn't very fair to Leaky Pen because I really do like it.

What I haven't seen much of is any discussion about how it reacts in combination with other glasses, so I'm hoping I can add a little to the general body of knowledge about this colour.

Colour Density
Even over Clear, Leaky Pen is very, very, very dark. (Bead #3)  It really needs to be put over a light opaque colour to shine.  I used it over Seashell Swirl in Bead #7 because it's one of the only light colours apart from Ivory that I'm using at the moment, and that helped considerably.  There's a bit of a reaction with Seashell Swirl, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

Reduction
If you happen to boil Leaky Pen while you're melting it as I did in Bead #2, and then you reduce it, the boily parts will turn red.  The rest of the bead didn't seem inclined to get that brick-red reduction film but the bubbly part sure did.

Temperature Sensitivity
During my torching session, I observed that if I pressed a bead (cooling the surface significantly) and then reintroduced it to the flame, the whole boiling thing got worse, perhaps because of the extra travelling to extremes.  If I make another pressed bead with Leaky Pen, I'll make sure I either go REALLY slow with the heating, or I'll encase it before I press it so that I can avoid the issue completely.

Reactions
I used silver leaf for my silver test with Leaky Pen (Bead #4) because it was easier to get at when I decided at the last minute that I needed some silver.  I did get the bead too hot, and it did boil for this particular test, and look what happened to the silver!  The result is that the silver is all webbed and weird, and that it's turned an interesting shade of turquoise. I wish I'd remembered to do the bead with the silver reduced and encased.  Grrr.

Leaky Pen is a good base for silver glass.  I had decent success with striking Terra frit on it, and the other silver glass frit that I reduced worked out just fine.

There's some fun to be had with Seashell Swirl and Leaky Pen.  Around the blue stringer and dots, an outline of pink formed that is at odds with the rest of the bead's streakiness.  This is sort of cool, and worth remembering.  I wonder if it does this with other pinks as well?

And look at the difference between how Leaky Pen looks over Seashell Swirl and how it looks over Ivory.  On Ivory, it goes a dark, denimy, more greenish blue.

It also develops that dark line the same way all of the blues and turquoises do with Ivory, and the dark line gets all oozy and strange.  I don't know if I like this or not, but it's definitely interesting.  I made some flowers on a bead last week with Leaky Pen over Ivory and I'm expecting them to look hideous.  I guess we'll see.

General Impressions
In general, I think Leaky Pen is a great addition to my palette, but it requires extra attention when working it or the results aren't very pleasant.  It's a colour I NEED, but not a colour I LOVE, if that makes sense.  I'm certainly not done playing with it.

In the past, I've had success striking really stubborn silver glass when using Leaky Pen as a base.  TAG Jelly Opal, for instance, is one of the most stubborn striking colours I've yet used, but over Leaky Pen it got all kinds of interesting colour.  Since it's the only notable bead I have with Leaky Pen, I'll go ahead and show it even though I made it months and months ago (last April, to be exact) and looking at it makes me wince.

For contrast, here's a bead that I made around the same time with TAG Jelly Opal without the Leaky Pen as an additive:

Here are some fun beads made with Leaky Pen.