Test Results :: Caramel

Reichenbach Caramel (RL7205) is a medium, pinkish brown opaque colour. It's a reactive colour, and is translucent when used in thin layers on top of other colours. This means that it goes a bit blotchy and see-through when you use it on top of very dark colours, and it fades out and looks yellower than itself when it's used on top of very pale colours.

It's browner than Flamingo, but it has many of the same kinds of reactions with other colours.

Here you can see the colour variation of Caramel. It can't decide if it's brown or pink. And then, when you reduce it, it can't decide whether it's purple or blue.

Silver leaf turns Caramel a yellowish colour. Reducing and encasing the silver just makes for a yellowish grey layer under your clear, which it seems wise to avoid.

I got pretty colour and reaction outlines from my reducing silver glass frit on top of this colour. I also got a very nice, almost-magical starting strike from my TerraNova2 frit. So, this colour seems to make a very pretty base colour for silver glass.

So, that whiteish outline that developed around the Copper Green in the leftmost bead is new for me. Or at least I thought it was until I looked back at my Flamingo test results and saw that Copper Green did this with that colour as well.

On top of Caramel, Opal Yellow separates.  

Ivory and Caramel develop a reciprocal (and quite intense) black line reaction which, because of Caramel's translucence in thin layers, means that the Caramel develops a strange, brown blotchiness on top of Ivory.

Here are some pictures of beads that contain Caramel.

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 :: Lime Green

Reichenbach Lime Green (RL4017) is a medium green transparent glass that is quite pale in thin layers, but darkens up significantly when used in solid, self-coloured beads. It darkens a little when worked, so you can expect any beads you make with this colour to end up somewhat darker than the rod colour might lead you to believe.

In this picture, Lime Green is in the middle. On its left is Effetre Olive Transparent, and on it's right is Effetre Light Grass Green. It's the darkest of the three, and builds saturation quickly as you build up a bead.

Here, you can see that the rightmost bead, which I reduced, looks no different from the left hand bead, which I did not.

Silver crusts up on top of Lime Green and develops some bluish haze. When the silver is reduced and encased, some of that blue haze can be captured under the clear layer. In the rightmost bead, I tried encasing some silver foil with Lime Green. I do this to see if the silver will turn yellow. It didn't :)

Lime Green is an interesting base for Silver Glass. Because it is a little stiffer than the Double Helix and TAG colours in my reducing frit blend, my frit spread out on it which was nice. I got a nice starting strike from my TerraNova2 frit on top of this colour, but nothing extraordinary.

I saw some very slight separation in Ivory, Copper Green, and Peace on top of this colour, but not enough that I am even tagging those reactions to Lime Green for future reference. I didn't get many unusual reactions when I used Lime Green on top of other glasses, either, although when I used it on top of Copper Green, I did notice that the edges of the dots and stringer lines looked much brighter turquoise than can be seen elsewhere on the bead.

Here's a goddess bead made with Lime Green and some green frit. I'm not very pleased with how this came out, but am not too proud to show it anyway. If nothing else, it demonstrates how this colour is actually quite saturated and looks very dark when melted into a solid mass.

These beads also contain some Lime Green.

Test Results :: White (Reichenbach)

Reichenbach White (RL1200) is an opaque white glass that loses its opacity when used in thin layers. It's also a colour with compatibility challenges, because I did not manage in any of my testing to find a single colour that it does not crack with. The batch of it that I had is not compatible with Effetre Black, CiM Tuxedo, Double Helix Zephyr, or any of the other colours I've tried it with in these test beads. It's not very interesting reaction-wise apart from some pretty fuming with silver, and it's easily four times the price of Effetre White. You can make up your own mind, but I'll pass on more.

I did make and photograph these test beads, though, so I may as well show them to you.

Reducing this colour does not change it.

Like Effetre White and CiM Peace, Reichenbach White fumes a pretty colour of yellow when used with silver.

It's not evident in the picture, but the bead on the right, where I encased the silvered Reichenbach White, cracked. It cracked along the mandrel line, so at first I thought maybe it was a viscosity problem between the white and the clear layer. But then, a couple of weeks after I made these beads (and after my glass review article had been submitted to Glass Bead Evolution), I noticed that every single bead I made with this White and at least one other colour had cracked. To be fair, I didn't try it with very many colours -- just the ones seen here plus some beads I made with CiM Tuxedo and Effetre Black -- but every single one of the beads where Reichenbach White was not all by itself had tiny hair-thin cracks surrounding the other colour details.

The bead where I used silver with this colour but did not encase it was a survivor and is actually sort of attractive, so if you have any of this colour lying around and want to use it up, single-coloured beads with silver seems like a good, safe way to do it.

Silver glass reduced on this colour fumes the White a soft yellow. My TerraNova2 frit didn't do much on top of it. Neither of these test results matter much in light of the compatibility issues.

Reichenbach White is not very reactive, and there is really nothing to say about it here from that perspective, however you can see how much it loses its opacity in thin layers when you look at how it behaved over Tuxedo.

Test Results :: Middle Blue

Reichenbach Middle Blue (RL3018) is a pretty light aqua. The rods I had seemed to be seeded with itty bitty bubbles, which I found a little odd. There were too many, too consistently through the rods for it to be an accident (or maybe not?) and the result is sort of pretty, unless what you want is a smooth, bubble-free transparent aqua.

This colour, or at least this batch of this colour, was very stiff -- much stiffer than the other transparents I've tried from this line. Possibly because of this difference in viscosity, I had some dramatic incompatibility issues with this colour, which you'll see as we go through the tests.

Middle Blue darkens a little if you reduce it. I was trying to get it to turn red, but it refused to do that.

The left half of this bead was Effetre Light Aqua, and the right half was Reichenbach Middle Blue. You can see a compatibility crack around the middle of this bead where the two colours meet.

Middle blue is not terribly reactive with silver, although I got some yellow fuming in the middle bead which may be as much due to the Clear as the Middle Blue.

The middle bead is a core of Middle Blue, rolled in silver, and encased with Effetre Clear after reducing the silver. I'm not sure you can see all of the cracks in the bead from the picture above, so I included a photo of the bead in the two pieces that it divided itself into, below.

This kind of cracking can only be from incompatibility, so this batch of Middle Blue is clearly not a great fit for using with other 104 CoE colours unless you can find some with a comparably stiff viscosity. If you do plan use this colour with other glasses, make sure you do some pre-production testing first.

Middle Blue was not particularly interesting with either my reduction frit blend or my TerraNova2 frit.

Middle Blue is not a very reactive colour, but I did get some dark line reaction with Ivory. The most interesting thing about this reaction was that it happened when I used the Middle Blue on top of the Ivory, but not when I used the Ivory on top of the Middle Blue. I think this is because the reaction is fairly gentle and happens where the two colours meet, but isn't strong enough to wrap the edges. It's only visible through the Middle Blue because it is transparent.

I didn't make any surviving beads with this colour. I tried a goddess with some frit, but it is cracked all through. here's a photo of it anyway.

Test Results :: Iris Dense Blue

Reichenbach Iris Dense Blue (RL3206) is a lovely colour, and much more fun to use than you could guess just by looking at an unmelted rod of it. It's soft as butter, very reactive with other colours, and lovely reduced. Let's look at some details.

Iris Dense Blue in solid-coloured beads is a mottled blue with a greenish cast, with dark veiny streaks running through it. I expected it to be brighter and sort of lividly blue, and this was a very pleasant surprise. When this colour is reduced, it develops a metallic sheen on it. You can see this sheen on both the middle and right-most beads, although for some reason it looks redder in the middle bead. I think that the amount of reduction alters the colour of it somewhat.

As I found in the rightmost bead, you can encase the reduction on Iris Dense Blue and achieve a mother-of-pearl effect. It does burn off easily, though, so you have to work cool if you want it to stick around. I managed to keep rather more of the reduction in this bead than I did in the pair of gobstoppers at the end of this post.

Silver spreads out and beads up on top of Iris Dense Blue. When the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a silvery blanket under the clear layer.

In the leftmost bead, my little fritty bits of silver glass developed an organic light border, and the surface of the Iris Dense Blue reduced to a gunmetal-ish colour.

In the rightmost bead, I got an interesting light border around all of my TerraNova2 frit and a starting  strike to burgundy, but no unusually great striking results.

Iris Dense Blue separates on top of Tuxedo, and if you compare the way it looks on top of Tuxedo to how it looks on top of all of the other colours here, I think you'll have to agree that it looks both brighter and bluer on top of that colour than with any of the others.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Peace all separate on top of Iris Dense Blue, and Iris Dense Blue separates on top of them as well, a faint dark line running through the centre of its dots and stringer lines. It fumes Peace a weird greenish colour, both when Peace is above and when it is below it.

The big star of this series of tests is the behaviour with Ivory. On top of Ivory, Iris Dense Blue separates into light and dark, and throws a brown reaction line. The resulting effect is of a 3-dimensional set of stringer lines and dots that looks raised off of the Ivory base glass which is very appealing. When Ivory is used on top of Iris Dense Blue, the result is still interesting. You still get the dark line and the light outline, but because the reaction 'shadow' encroaches on the Ivory and not the blue, the stringer dots and lines take on a messier, uneven appearance.


Here are some beads that include Iris Dense Blue.

Test Results :: Multicolor

Reichenbach Multicolor (RL6209) has changed a little since the first time I used it, indicating to me that it might not be all that consistent from batch to batch. This most recent supply that I got is much easier to strike and a little darker than the last batch of this colour that I tried.

This colour is less saturated hue-wise than Multicolor Dark, more reactive with other colours (the reactions are similar, just more intesnse), and I found it a bit slower to strike.

Multicolor is fairly stiff, making it nice to work with sculpturally, although its striking nature means that you need to be careful to keep even heat or you end up with a sort of blotchy result.

Making a simple spacer from multicolor, I got very pretty, variegated greens and blues. When I reduced a Multicolor bead, I got a shiny gunmetal purple.

When silver leaf is melted into the surface of Multicolor, it looks a uniform light teal colour, except for where there are gaps in the silver layer. When the silver is reduced and encased, it looks more yellowish, and the multicolor peeking through the gaps, instead of looking blue, looks a reddish purple colour.

Multicolor is very reactive with other colours.  It separates Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Peace, and forms a serious dark line reaction with Ivory.

Here are some other beads made with Reichenbach Multicolor:

Here in the goddess bead, you can see that in the places where I reheated the surface with some concentrated heat (nipple and belly button areas), I got a very strong strike to purple.