Test Results :: Butter Pecan Unique #5

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ Raku, 8 - w/ Tuxedo, 9 - w/ Copper Green, 10 - 2/ Opal Yellow, 11 - w/ Ivory, 12 - w/ White, 13 - w/ Olive

CiM Butter Pecan Unique #5 is officially one of my favourite colours, so I hope there's still some left when I allow myself to order glass for the first time this year.  This colour is versatile and interesting, and makes a brilliant base colour for organics.  I like it better than Butter Pecan Unique #4, which I posted about last October.

When you reduce Butter Pecan Unique #5, the colour of it warms up a bit and the surface goes faintly shiny. This is evident in the little crystal that I reduced as well as in the lentil I made with reducing silver glass frit. This colour, like Butter Pecan Unique #4, is very, very soft and drippy when you get it really hot.  For me, this means that if I'm going to make a pressed lentil with it, I want a core of Clear underneath the Butter Pecan Unique #5 or I squoosh the glass too much and end up with knobby bits at the end of my bead.  Yuck.  This is totally a heat control thing, and I know it, but coring the bead with Clear helps me avoid this problem.

Silver leaf is gorgeous on top of Butter Pecan Unique #5, crystallizing and forming a golden crust while fuming the surface of the bead to a rich brown.  Reduced and encased, this reaction is a vivid royal blue interspersed with silver.  Butter Pecan Unique #4 did not turn my silver blue this way, and silver leaf sits on top of Butter Pecan Unique #4 with more of a flat, shiny finish.

 

Butter Pecan Unique #5 is not a star with silver glass either, which is the wording I used to describe how I felt about Butter Pecan Unique #4 and silver glass.  However, I did find that I sort of like how Butter Pecan Unique #5 looks with 104 Raku.

One thing sort of interesting and worth a bit of a note is how the Butter Pecan Unique #5 went sort of satiny in the bead with the reducing silver glass frit after it had been reduced.  You can see in the picture, above, the way the light plays off of the Butter Pecan Unique #5 that has been fumed by the silver glass.  The other interesting thing is how the Raku has made the Butter Pecan Unique #5 sort of rise up and separate from itself around the Raku stringer in the bead on the far right (above).

Tuxedo bleeds into Butter Pecan Unique #5 in the middle of this test bead, and creates a strange blueish purple streakiness. The Butter Pecan #5 has sort of risen around the Tuxedo stringer work in places, and the colour of the Butter Pecan #5 side of this bead seems almost tea-stained. On top of Tuxedo, Butter Pecan Unique #5 develops a shiny outline to its dots and stringer lines.

On top of Butter Pecan Unique #5, Copper Green develops a dark outline and a shiny, dark patina.  When Butter Pecan Unique #5 is used on top of Copper Green, there is no reaction to speak of.  I really find this odd, because my expectation is that if the colours are reactive, they will behave oddly under both circumstances (as the base AND as decoration) but that was totally not the case here.

In a very similar way to what I noticed with Butter Pecan Unique #4, Butter Pecan Unique #5 and Opal Yellow have an odd relationship.  On top of Opal Yellow, Butter Pecan Unique #5 develops a dark line around the dots and stringer lines.  On top of Butter Pecan Unique #5, Opal Yellow looks sort of chalky, floaty and dirty.

 

There's nothing too exciting to report on the Ivory and White fronts, although the Ivory dots in the picture on the left seem sort of floaty on top of the Butter Pecan Unique #5.

Like Butter Pecan Unique #4, some serious separation and curdling happens when it is used on top of Lauscha Olive.  This reaction is milder than the one with the #4 unique though, because the green of the Olive hasn't permeated the Butter Pecan Unique #5 and migrated into the centre of the dots.

And here are some fun beads with Butter Pecan Unique #5.  I have some serious love for this colour.

 

Test Results :: Porcelain

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

General Impressions
Reichenbach Porcelain (RL7202) is a weird and wonderful colour that looks very similar to White in rod form.  I've been pestering one of my friends to melt the half-pound she bought earlier this year every chance I get, but she has been avoiding it because it just looks like boring old White in the rod.  Boy, has she been missing out!  I'm not sure I have completely grasped all of the strange things going on in my Porcelain beads, but the things that I have found so far have been awesome.

While Porcelain looks like White in rod form, it is definitely not white in the same way that Effetre White is white.  It is well-named, because it really does remind me of porcelain - not quite white, not quite ivory, but somewhere in between and very reminiscent of bone.

In thin layers, Porcelain is translucent, which is an interesting effect both in florals and in surface decoration on top of other colours.  As a base colour, it can be reactive, but it does not really react in ways that I consider predictable for a white or ivory family kind of colour.

In the picture below, you will see two crystals that I made with Porcelain in my crystal press.  I added a second layer of dots to get the size right for my press, and this has resulted in a thin, pink translucent line forming in between where the layers meet.  This effect is not unpleasant, but it means that solid crystals or other pressed shapes where you might need to add glass will be sort of challenging with porcelain if the end result is supposed to be smooth and seamless.

Also, I'm not really sure where the pink is coming from.  You'll see it in a few more beads as you read through the rest of this, and I would need to test a host of other colours with Porcelain to be able to definitively say 'I think this is why it's pink'.  Either it is pink here because it is reacting with itself, or it is pink here because Porcelain can strike to pink and it happened because of my brass press, or it is pink for some other, more arcane, reason.  I'm not really sure :)

The reactions I have obtained with Porcelain in this limited set of test beads completely blew me away, and I think that Porcelain is one of my new favourite colours.

Reactions

In the bead on the left, I added silver leaf to the porcelain and just melted it in.  It has left a brown residue over a lot of the bead.  In the bead on the right, I added silver leaf to the Porcelain, melted it in, reduced it and then encased it with Effetre Clear.  The result of that is the snowy white blanket that I sometimes get in this test and a slight yellowing of the Porcelain that I suspect is from reducing the silver.

In the bead on the left, I overstruck my TerraNova2 frit, which is the first time that's happened to me in a while.  How embarrassing!  The weird thing here is how very pink the Porcelain has gotten under the frit. Again, I pressed this bead and I struck it repeatedly (*sigh*) so I'm not sure if it was that striking or if it was the silver glass that turned it pink. I feel strongly that the TerraNova2 frit problem is all my fault, and deep inside, I know this is a colour that will be nice with striking colours. You will see below what it does with Raku.

In the bead on the right, the Porcelain has turned yellow with the reduced silver glass frit.  The silver glass frit developed its colour nicely, and I am pretty happy with how the reduction colours look on Porcelain.  I am hypothesizing that reducing the silver glass made it fume yellow on this one, too.  Odd contrast though, right?  I wouldn't have imagined this in 1000 years.

 

And holy crap, this is Porcelain with Raku.  Raku and I are not the best of friends, but this reaction is killing me.  A white-ish halo rises up out of the Porcelain to support the Raku stringer dots and lines, and leaves a darker pink line in between.  Then, to put icing on the cake, the darker pink reactiony bits boiled but the rest of the bead didn't, which means I have two sets of decoration here.  The decoration I applied... and then the decoration that boiled, because the boily bit is every bit as precise as the stringer work I did and looks like it was etched or sandblasted on purpose but stayed sparkly.  Cool, right?

Tuxedo bled onto Porcelain just a bit, and the Porcelain has just the faintest tinge of pink when used with this colour.

I love the way Copper Green behaves with Porcelain.  No grey-green sheen on this Copper Green.  On top of Porcelain, the Copper Green has separated so that the outsides of the lines and dots have a lighter outline and darker middle.  The Porcelain on the right side of this bead has turned pinkish in places, but not uniformly like in some of the other beads.

On the left side of the bead, the Copper Green has really brightened up and is a turquoise colour that is just gorgeous.  Apart from keeping the Copper Green clean, there is not much reaction from the Porcelain on top of Copper Green.

I don't really know what happened here.... one side of the bead was supposed to be Opal Yellow and the other side was supposed to be Porcelain, but as it turns out, they don't really look different enough when they're hot for me to keep them straight when I forget to focus at the torch.

Regardless, the Opal Yellow almost looks dirty when used with Porcelain, the Porcelain struck to pink on top of Opal Yellow, and where I used Opal Yellow beside or over top of the Porcelain, it developed a lighter outline and a darker, dirtier centre colour to the dots and lines.

Here you can see the colour difference between Ivory and Porcelain pretty well.  On the right side of the bead, you can see that Ivory is a fair bit warmer than Porcelain.  On the left side of the bead, you can see that Ivory has a hard time dealing with this... it looks all yellowed where it is right up against the Porcelain and then dirty in a big swath and then finally, more like itself towards the end of the bead.

 

And here is Porcelain with White.  There is no obvious reaction here but you can see on the right side of the bead that the Porcelain is a warmer colour than white, and looks sort of like a greyish ivory colour.

Regardless, it's all yummy.  This colour and I are going to have a long relationship together.  The viscosity of it makes it dreamy to work with in stringer form, it makes a fantastic base colour for Raku (and hopefully other reactive colours as well) and doesn't do that dark line thing with turquoises.  It's versatile, it's beautiful and it's interesting.

Here are some of my fun beads with Porcelain: