Test Results :: Mystic Violet

Reichenbach Mystic Violet (RL0201) is a medium purple semi-opaque colour that works up like shampoo glass. The more you heat and work this colour, the more it loses its rich, pretty purpleness, so if you want to keep the dark plumminess that you see in my spacer beads below, don't use presses on it, and work quickly.

Mystic Violet devitrifies, and is very sensitive to overworking. I made a goddess bead with it, and everywhere I joined new Mystic Violet to old Mystic Violet and melted it in, the seams are pocked with little marks from where the glass pitted and devitrified. 

I left this goddess bead in the tumbler for I don't even know how many cycles, and it never really ended up looking the way I wished it would. The devitrification was so strong that even tumbling her for so long that the grit in my tumbler wore her nipples off couldn't fix the discolouration and pitting problems.

Here you can see that Mystic Violet is a little lighter than Effetre Medium Amethyst, and you can also see the shampoo effect as it's worked up. Because of the 'mystic' shampooness of it, you can see a lot more of this glass' colour than you usually can from a transparent that is this deep. Case in point -- what colour would you say Dark Amethyst and Simply Berry were if you didn't already know they were purple?

Silver beads up and disperses on top of Mystic Violet. When the silver is reduced and encased, it looks fairly uniformly mauve on top of this colour, and has a slightly lacy feel to it.

In the bead on the left, you can see from my one press and subsequent firepolishing of this bead that the colour is starting to leave the Mystic Violet.

Mystic Violet isn't remarkable as a base for silver glass. I got an 'ok' starting strike in my TerraNova2 frit, but nothing remarkable.

Mystic Violet is not very reactive, but Copper Green does separate on top of it. To a much lesser degree, so do Opal Yellow and Ivory.

Here are some other beads made with Mystic Violet.

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 :: 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.