Test Results :: Opal Orange

Reichenbach Opal Orange (RL6214) is a not-quite-but-almost-opaque bright orange. Used on top of other colours in a single layer, the resulting dots and lines have good opacity, but if you reheat this colour, the very topmost layer gets a slight translucency that is quite interesting.

Here, you can see that Opal Orange is a bit of a striker. The bead that I reduced (on the right) is a deeper orange than the one that did not receive the additional heat exposure.

Silver fumes Opal Orange to a darker hue. On top of Opal Orange, silver leaf takes on a golden-iron appearance. The bead on the right where I reduced and encased the silver is a snowy white with touches of blue under the clear layer.

On top of Opal Orange, my silver glass frit seemed to migrate a bit towards the bead's centre in both tests. My reducing silver glass frit looks darker on top of this colour than on others I've used the same blend on. I got nice colours from TerraNova2 frit on top of this colour.

The only real reaction I observed in these beads was the dark line that formed between Copper Green and Opal Orange, and a very slight amount of separation in it on top of Tuxedo.

Here are some beads made with Opal Orange:

Test Results :: Lipstick

Reichenbach Lipstick (RL6116) is a bright, happy semi-opaque (opal) red. This colour melts really nicely, does not boil easily, and didn't turn grey on me the way Reichenbach Strawberry did, although I should really try that colour again now that I have a more powerful oxygen concentrator.

Here is Lipstick with some other colours for reference.  Effetre Light Red is actually quite similar to Lipstick, although I think Lipstick is a bit lighter and a bit less opaque.  CiM Valentine and CiM Hemoglobin are substantially darker.  CiM Maraschino is darker in colour and more transparent than Lipstick.

Lipstick does not change significantly when it is reduced.

On top of Lipstick, silver leaf really crusts up, and the Lipstick itself fumes a dark colour. When the silver is reduced and encased, it turns blue. The Lipstick stays dark though, and does not lighten under the clear the way some other colours have for this test.

Lipstick is a good base for silver glass. I got some nice colour out of both my TerraNova2 frit and my blend of reduction glasses on top of this colour, and the dark line that forms around the fritty bits really make them pop.

Here you can see that because this colour is not fully opaque, it looks significantly lighter when used over a lighter base colour.

Lipstick separates on top of Tuxedo, and the edges of Tuxedo stringer lines and dots on top of Lipstick are a little fuzzy.

All of the colours I used here with Lipstick seem to have spread on top of it.  Ivory separated and developed a lightline up the middle, and there is a greyish dark line reaction with Copper Green that is both wide and blotchy.

Here are some other beads made with Lipstick:

Test Results :: Yellow

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

I never expected to love Effetre Yellow, but making these test beads has made me love it a lot. The best thing about falling in love with a colour like this one is that it is both cheap and readily available in addition to being really interesting and beautiful. And this is coming from someone who doesn't even really like yellow.

Yellow is reactive with silver but stable with other colours. It is on the golden side of yellow, and so is less livid than a lot of other shades of yellow glass I've used.  It melts nicely without bubbling or boiling, and it doesn't pit or do other unpleasant things when you're working it. The reactions that Yellow has with other colours fall in with my expectations of the family of colours that includes Kelp, Straw Yellow, Light Brown Transparent, and Mojito.

In the leftmost bead here, you can see that the silver has darkened the Yellow significantly, and beaded up on the surface of the bead in a strange way.  In the bead on the right, encasing the silver has produced a blueish/greenish reaction in places, and you can see the darkened yellow through the gaps where there is no silver on the base bead.

For this bead, I made a base of Yellow, rolled it in silver foil and then encased with more Yellow. Underneath the encasement layer, the silver looks almost burgundy.  I expected it to turn a coppery colour the way it does with Straw Yellow, but I guess the more saturated nature of this Yellow yields a darker, richer result.

I got beautiful, vivid colour from my reducing silver glass frit on top of Yellow, and I also got decent colour from TerraNova 2.  The biggest, most exciting surprise that Yellow gave me was what happened in the rightmost bead.  I did not expect this colour to work this way as silver glass frit stringer, but it not only worked but has amazing striations in it and beautiful blues and greens.

To make the bead furthest to the right, I melted a big blob of Yellow on the end of a rod, and then dipped it in my reducing silver glass frit blend.  I melted that in and re-dipped it a couple of times and then pulled it out into stringer.  I used that to encase a core of Yellow, and then without reducing it, encased the resulting bead with Clear.  I love this effect a lot.

Copper Green behaves a little oddly with Yellow.  When I used Yellow on top of it, a light line formed around most of the Yellow dots and stringer lines, and the Copper Green developed a sort of mottled, pinkish look to it.  When I used Copper Green on top of Yellow, it got pretty dark and seemed to pit more than usual.  Tuxedo on top of Yellow seemed more translucent than I am accustomed to it being.  Apart from those things, I didn't notice much else of interest in these beads.

And here is the Yellow goddess.  She shows how rich this colour is when used alone in a sculptural piece. I will post some more sample beads when I come back to this colour, although I am not sure when that will be.

Test Results :: Peachy Keen

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

CiM Peachy Keen is a juicy, beautiful light peach transparent. Peachy Keen is far brighter and is quite a lot more saturated than Lauscha Peach, but like Lauscha Peach, the consistency of Peachy Keen is very nice. I didn't experience any boiling, shocking, splintering or any other annoying behaviour while I was using it.

On top of Peachy Keen, silver leaf sort of disperses and forms itself into little balls on the surface. The silver definitely discolours the Peachy Keen, turning it a brownish colour. When the silver is reduced and encased, magic happens. You can see in the bead on the right that the silver has turned all different shades of blue and purple under the encasement layer of Effetre Clear.

Peachy Keen turns silver golden when it is used to encase.

I got much more interesting results from this frit stringer test than I anticipated. I used my reducing silver glass frit blend (which contains a bunch of random Double Helix reduction frits, currently, as well as the last of my Black Nebula frit). I've made frit stringer, here, from Peachy Keen by dipping it in the reducing silver glass frit three times, coating it more or less completely.  I then made a core of Peachy Keen, encased it with the frit stringer and encased it without reducing.

The effect, with Peachy Keen, is really too dark. It's hard to see what's going on in there. But it worked!

There isn't really a lot going on in these test beads with silver glass. I got ok colour from the reducing silver glass frit, but my TerraNova2 frit just sat on top of the bead like a dead thing.

However, I feel the same way about this colour as I do about Cardamom... it does not matter that silver glass is not its forte.

Peachy Keen is not very reactive with these colours I test with, but there are a couple of things to say about these test beads.

Peachy Keen and Copper Green develop a mutual dark line reaction. The line seems to be an extremely dark green rather than black, so it's an entirely different reaction than the one that happens with Ivory, but it's definitely present in both of these test beads.

Peachy Keen does not react with Opal Yellow, but it does look very pretty on top of it.

Test Results :: Caribbean

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

CiM Caribbean is a pretty medium blue colour, a touch darker than Effetre Medium Blue, and quite a bit lighter than CiM Sapphire.  It also seems like it might be a hair on the greener side than Sapphire is. It is a pretty colour that is fairly stable, not reacting strongly with other colours.

I found Caribbean a relatively pleasant colour to use, although it is a little easier to boil than I really like. Working higher up in the flame solves this problem.  I only really had trouble with it when I was using it as stringer or heating the end of the rod specifically to make dots.

Silver Foil stays mostly silver when it is encased with Caribbean, although you can see that there are a couple of gold patches in the left-most bead. Putting silver on top of Caribbean makes it darker. The bead on the middle here is far darker in colour than the bead with the silver foil in it, with smudges and sprays of silver wandering over its surface. When this combination is reduced and encased, the Caribbean lightens back up so that you can see through it again and the silver takes on all kinds of attractive blue colour.

These last two reactions are pretty similar to what I experienced with CiM Sapphire.

Silver Glass Reduction Frit is pretty on top of Caribbean, but I didn't get much colour out of my TerraNova2 Frit on top of it. The bead with the silver glass frit stringer is interestingly streaky, but I didn't get any really interesting effects in it.  In terms of the reactions I have seen with other colours, this one was only moderately successful.

Unlike Sapphire, Caribbean does not turn orange when used on top of Copper Green.  It does develop a faint dark line reaction with Ivory, and it almost disappears on top of Peace.

Tuxedo is faintly translucent on top of Caribbean, Copper Green turns shiny and orangey when used on top of it. There were no really obvious reactions when Opal Yellow, Ivory or Peace were used on top of Caribbean.

Some fun beads with Caribbean:

 

Test Results :: Mystic Coral

Finally I'm posting these.  I have two more sets sitting here on my desk but I've been just exhausted.  I get to wake up tomorrow morning and assemble all of my new Ikea furniture for my workstation, which will be located outside until I figure out what to do with the shed to make it habitable.

1 - Plain (understruck), 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - Over Clear, 4 - As a floral, 5 - w/ Silver Leaf, 6 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 7 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Blend (reduced) 8 - w/ Terranova2 Frit, 9 - w/ Copper Green, 10 - w/ Tuxedo, 11 - w/ Opal Yellow, 12 - w/ Ivory, 13 - w/ White

Reichenbach Mystic Coral (RL0606) is one of the most interesting colours I have tested, and I am looking forward to getting to know it even better.  Lampworkers often refer to really vibrant colours as 'juicy' and this is a seriously juicy colour.

General Impressions

Mystic Coral is a striking color, but the strike is fairly easy to control. You pretty much just have to let it cool down and then give it a good warming. I deliberately understruck the first spacer bead for an interesting tangerine-on-coral shimmer. The smaller spacer was reduced, which meant it got an extra shot of heat.  Reducing Mystic Coral doesn't really have much effect. As with Mystic Beige, I don't quite have a handle on how you control the transparency of this glass, but I'm going to play with it and figure it out.

Putting Mystic Coral over Clear doesn't do much to tone it down.  The Clear core thins the color out just a little, but it's very dense. And gorgeous!

Reactions

In the bead on the left, the silver has darkened the surface of the Mustic Coral a fair bit, and gone sort of blue and silver and gold/yellow.  I'm always intrigued when the silver doesn't ball up and leaves a sort of stain on the bead because it always makes for an interesting effect when i encase it. In the bead on the right, I applied the silver leaf, melted it in, reduced it and then encased it with Effetre Clear. I'm a little bit awestruck by the powerful blue I got when I encased it.

Silver glass colour seems to develop well on this glass.  I hope it's apparent from the picture -- sometimes a glass base colour is just NFG for silver glass, and sometimes it is so wonderful that it cannot be believed. Mystic Coral is somewhere in the middle, leaning more towards the wonderful side. In both cases, the silver in the glass significantly darkened the base bead, but it's a pretty, deep red colour.  I can't wait to make some real beads with this colour and give it a proper workout.

Mystic Coral and Copper Green share the same awesome reaction that Copper Green has with Lauscha Cocoa. The Copper Green separates and goes lighter wherever it is next to the Mystic Coral, which includes the Copper Green lines and dots and the place in the middle where the two colours join. With Mystic Coral, though, the reaction is even more interesting than what happens with Cocoa because the dots and lines get faintly darker around the edges in addition to the reaction that happens inside the Copper Green areas.  This reaction is very much like how Copper Green behaved with Mystic Beige.

The other neat thing that happened is that the Mystic Coral lines and dots on top of the Copper Green have a sort of shampoo sheen to them.

There isn't much in the way of reaction between Mystic Coral and Tuxedo. It's kinda cool how you can see a little of the Mystic Coral on top of the Tuxedo on the left-hand side of the bead because of its odd translucency.

Mystic Coral bled into Opal Yellow a bit in the centre of this bead, but apart from that, there's not much to see here.

Mystic Coral sort of bleeds onto Ivory too, in a gentle, transparent-blushy way. Ivory looks fantastic with Mystic Coral... I think I am in love.  In some of the beads at the end of this post, I used it with Reichenbach Porcelain, and that was really nice too.

These pictures are sort of awful, and I apologize for that.  I have to figure out the best place to take pictures in this new space.  However, here are some other beads made with Mystic Coral.