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 Dark

Reichenbach Multicolor Dark (RL6206) is a reactive striking colour. It is relatively easy to strike. The rods are a reddish purple colour, they go transparent when heated, and then turn green as they cool, then striking to blue, purple, and sometimes even a reddish colour.

You can see here that reducing the Multi Dark doesn't make it shiny and doesn't cloud it up the way Raku behaves when reduced. Here, it just advanced the colour of the glass into the purple hues.

I have noticed that in order to strike this colour, you need to let it get fairly cool and then give it a thorough, deliberate reheating. I was not able to screw it up -- no matter how I did it, I still got great colour, so that's a huge point in its favour.

I've now had two different versions of Multi Dark - or at least they seem different based on the appearance of the unmelted rods.

Both of the goddesses below are solid Multi Dark.  The top one was made with the darker rods and the bottom one was made with the older, paler-rodded variety. Maybe the newer, darker-rodded batch gives more deep blues, but it's also possible that these two beads received a different amount of heat, were cooled a different number of times, etc. This is a seriously beautiful colour, and no matter what batch of it you have, it's great glass.

  

On top of Multi Dark, silver disperses such that it's not really apparent on the surface. In so doing, it seems to inhibit the natural colours of the glass, or maybe just cover them up. When the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a solid layer through which you cannot see much of the base bead.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Peace all separate on top of Multi Dark, and Multi Dark does not inhibit the sheen that develops on top of Copper Green.

Ivory forms a dark line reaction and turns a dark greyish brown around the edges of the dots and stringer lines when used on top of Multi Dark, and it also seems to separate. When Multi Dark is used on top of Ivory, it gets a dark outline and fumes the base ivory a brownish colour.

Here are some other beads made with Multicolor Dark.

Test Results :: Algae

CiM Algae is a yellowish/greyish dark green transparent.  I think that this colour fills an important void in my 104 colour palette, and so I'm a bit sad that it's a limited run and only sporadically available.

There are only so many dark transparent greens in our colour palette.  To name a few, we have Effetre Sage Green, Effetre Dark Emerald, Effetre Dark Grass Green, CiM Slytherin, and REI Beryl Green, and none of them are in this exact yellow-green space.  Slytherin and Sage Green are the only other green transparent glasses that approach Algae in terms of saturation level, but Algae is darker and richer than both of those other colours. Algae is the only colour in this group that has adverse reactions with Ivory, which mean that it also has a very unique reaction profile compared to other transparent dark greens.

Here, you can see how very saturated this colour is. You can't see through the self-coloured spacers. As you can see in the rightmost bead, reducing Algae does not have any effect on the colour.

Silver on top of Algae develops some blue colour, and the crust that it forms is fairly even and uniform in texture. When the silver is reduced and encased, it turns yellow and all of the interesting patterning is lost out of it.

On top of Algae, I had interesting results with silver glass.  The reduction frit bloomed nicely on top of the Algae and has cool borders to all of the fritty bits.  I got a reasonable first blush of colour in the striking silver glass, too, although it's hard to see in the picture.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Peace all separate on top of Algae, whereas Ivory curdles a little and develops a dark reaction line.

When Algae is used on top of Copper Green, the Copper Green separates even more dramatically and pops up around the Algae dots and lines in light halos with dark turquoise veining in between.  On top of Opal Yellow and Peace, Algae separates so that it has a thin, dark line down the middle of its dots and stringer lines.  I can't remember the last transparent colour I tested that did this - usually it is opaque colours that I see this in.

On top of Ivory, Algae looks an ochre-y, brownish green version of itself.

Here are some beads made with Algae.

Test Results :: Streaky Denim

Effetre Streaky Denim is very streaky indeed. It is, however, not denimy at all, denim typically being neither purple nor cobalt blue in colour. Streaky Denim is one of the Effetre 'Cool Colours', a term which I have never heard explained. I used to think that these colours were so-classified because they were special batches of colour mixed from other regular production colours, and I guess for all I know that impression of mine could be true, but if it is, I wonder what this one would have in it. Maybe it's New Violet plus Light Cobalt?

Anyway, Streaky Denim is among the few of these so called 'Cool Colours' that I actually think is cool. I love Earth best, but you can't seem to be able to get that any more so it's best to just put it out of your head. In fact, I shouldn't have tempted you. Bad Melanie.

Where I used silver leaf on top of Streaky Denim, it sort of dispersed and is mostly not really visible on the bead's surface. However, when the bead is subsequently reduced and encased, you can see that the reason it was not visible on the surface was because it has spread itself thinly all over the bead. The rightmost bead in this picture has a shiny, mother-of-pearl effect under the encasement layer, and iridescent flashes of blue.

I've done this test with a lot of colours now (I think this might be colour #192 or #193) and at this point, what I am noticing is that some colours make silver spread out, some colours make it condense in on itself, and some colours don't influence its behaviour at all.

In my opinion, this colour doesn't make a great base for silver glass. The reducing silver glass frit looks washed out on top of it, and I had a hard time striking my TerraNova2 frit.

On top of Tuxedo and Copper Green, Streaky Denim separates and gets silvery around the edges. This reaction is pretty neat, and did not prepare me at all for what happened on the rest of the bead. For some reason, on top of Opal Yellow, Ivory, AND Peace, my Streaky Denim turned brown. This surprised me, and I'm not sure why it happened.  I should add also that in other beads, I have used Streaky Denim on top of both Opal Yellow and Ivory without this happening.  *sigh*

In spite of all this weirdness when it gets to be on top, when Streaky Denim is used as the base colour, the results are much less shocking, if not less confusing. Dots and stringer lines of Tuxedo, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace on top of Streaky Denim seem not to react at all, and Copper Green's only response is to blush turquoise and separate slightly, and fail to develop the dingy army-green sheen that it had in the bead on the left.

Here are some fun beads with Streaky Denim: