Winter Colour Diet - Session 10

I made a decision about how far I'm going with this colour diet last week, and picked an end date for my last post about it. Since I'm an orderly kind of person, I'm going to use the calendar hanging up in my kitchen, and my winter colour diet will be over (at least all of the beads will be made) by March 14th, and I should have it all posted as of the weekend before spring officially begins on March 20th this year.

I'm enjoying the process too much to end it earlier than that, but I have an awful lot of odds and ends of other glass that I'm itching to use up... so as soon as the colour diet is over, Spring Cleaning will begin. During Spring Cleaning, everything that I possess less than 5 rods of is going to get used up so that my glass stash is ready for its next phase of evolution.

Now that I've let you in a little bit on how anal retentive I am, I'll just show you the beads. Last weekend was a little up and down for me, and I was having trouble getting into a groove so the beads are a bit all over the place.

Well, would you look at that.  In both this bead AND the one below it, I got TerraNova2 to strike. I don't want to cry "mission accomplished" prematurely, but it just might be that I am over my striking silver glass hump. I'm really hoping so, because it's been driving me batty.

This bead (and the next one) is TerraNova2 over Light Brown Transparent. The flowers are Ivory, as are the dots I put on it.  The swirled stringer decoration is goldstone encased with Aurae. I'm not sure why I tried this, but it was a really interesting experiment. This bead and the one below were lightly reduced, but before I reduced them, the Aurae had gone an odd creamy colour that was partially translucent and I could still see the goldstone winking through. After reducing, they are shiny and opaque, but different from Aurae used all by itself.  I rather like the effect.

This bead is identical to the bead above, in terms of what's in it.

A monster, this bicone bead is 91 mm long. I'm still struggling with the shaping of these super-long beads a little, but this wasn't a bad effort.  It's Mermaid with silver glass frit and a little TerraNova2. The ends are Adamantium (although I'm wishing I'd done them with TerraNova2 for some reason) and there is SiS on the ends in a scribble. The picture doesn't really communicate how alive this bead looks... the silver glass is all shiny and mottled and looks really neat.

Woo hoo! The Dark Violet is ALL GONE. This is Dark Violet with some silver glass frit (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra). The ends and surface decoration are SiS, and it was reduced lightly before putting it in the kiln.

These Plasmablossoms are a little addictive. The base is Ivory over Pale Green Apple, and there are dots of Intense Black on it as well as the encased Goldstone stringer. The flowers are Dark Multicolor, which makes really pretty flowers in my opinion.

A set!! Well, as close as I generally get to one, anyway. The focal is a base of Black wrapped in frit stringer (Light Brown Transparent, Gaia, Khaos, Nyx), encased, and then end-capped in Adamantium and decorated with SiS. There are also some Ivory dots around the top of it. The spacers are Adamantium and SiS.

This bicone is made with the last of my Seashell Swirl (well, the last before I bought a new pound of it and put it away for safekeeping) and it is rolled in silver leaf, Terra frit and then capped with Adamantium ends. There is SiS decoration, and it was reduced lightly before being put away.

I think I'm getting in the mood for spring, because all of a sudden I feel like making flowers. The base is Ivory, and is encased in Pale Green Emerald. The Vine Cane was Artichoky with Intense Black and some Goldstone stringer that I guess got pulled so thin you can't see it at all. The coloured flowers are Dark Multicolor (overstruck) and the little ones are Ivory.

If I could do it all over again, I think I would have used black for the base, and I would have tried not to heat the flowers so much. Next week I'll get another chance!

Test Results :: Avocado

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - Plain - encased, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf, 5 - w/ Silver leaf - reduced & encased, 6 - w/ Khaos frit, 7 - w/ Double Helix frit blend (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra), 8 - w/ Ivory, 9 - w/ Black, 10 - w/ Copper Green

Effetre Avocado.  Nice colour!  It reminds me quite a bit of the Tamarind Unique I tested, with a few notable exceptions.  I didn't realize I was going to like this colour as much as I do because lots of other people have told me that they don't like it at all.  Well I have a plan that will fix that... they should just send it all to me!  I'll send them whatever Dark Violet and Anise White I can scare up in return.

I just had a conversation with Holly outside, and told her I was blogging about a colour called Avocado. She asked me if it was the colour of the inside of an avocado, or if it was the colour of the skin of an avocado, but the answer, of course, is neither. If anything, it's the colour of the inside of an avocado after you've forgotten you bought it and left it on the counter for too many days.  Rotten avocado is no good to eat, but so far, I'm enjoying making beads with it.

The other interesting thing about Avocado is that I have three different-looking varieties of it. I have one lot that is more or less the same colour in the rod as you see in the beads, above. I also have a lighter coloured rod that is a little silvery on the outside, and then, really strangely, some rods that look like a beiger version of Dark Ivory that have a rough feel to them.

I'm currently only using the brown ones and the silvery ones and so far they are more or less the same colour when melted. I'm not sure if I will get to the rough ones on this pass through my stash, but here's a picture of all three of the glasses I have whose labels claimed that they were Avocado.

Reduction
Reducing Avocado reddens it up a bit, turning it into more of a terracotta colour that I think is appealing, however it darkens and reds up this way when repeatedly struck in a neutral flame as well, so it may not be the reducing flame that is responsible for this.  (Bead #2)

Under Clear
Avocado looks exactly the same under clear encasement as it does all alone. Lots of colours look lighter when they're encased, but Avocado isn't one of them. (Bead #3 & #5)  I am afraid to encase Avocado very heavily.  Both of the encased beads I've made so far are fine, but they are pretty thinly encased. It feels like a colour that will crack, like Coral or Silver Pink, if too much Clear is wrapped around it.

Of course, you shouldn't let my paranoia stop you from trying it.  I really should have tested it myself, but until summer comes and I am able to make more than a dozen or so beads per week, I'm having trouble forcing myself to waste glass and time on things that I feel pretty certain just won't work. 

Reactions
I was surprised that Avocado wasn't more reactive with silver. Pleasantly surprised, because I think it means I can safely use Avocado as a base colour for my crazy organic silver-laden bicones and lentils.

The silver stayed more or less intact, lies on the surface in a sort of interesting way and didn't go all black the way Tamarind Unique did when I reduced it with silver on it.  (Beads #4 & #5)

I used Khaos frit for the striking silver glass test, and the results weren't the stupidest or most boring that I've yet had, but they aren't making me dance around either.  (Bead #6)

What I love, though, is the fun and interesting things that the reduction frit blend (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra) did on the Avocado. The frit got a silvery light border around its edges and really shines.  (Bead #7)

Ivory and Black don't really do much in the way of reactions with Avocado, but Copper Green looks really dark and a little shiny when used with it. (Bead #10) Like, really dark.  I've never seen Copper Green look this dark before and still look like itself. Usually, when Copper Green darkens, it does so with a disgusting grey scumminess that you can't see much of the colour through.

General Impressions
Avocado is a nice, stable colour with a rich, earthy feel to it that I am happy to use in my organic designs.  It is a pretty soft colour, maybe a 3 or 4 on a scale where Opal Yellow is a 1 and Black is a 10.  I made some silvered Avocado stringer, and I won't bother doing that again because the silver just sits on top of it.  It's really not like Ivory at all in that way or any other... Ivory greedily eats the silver up and excretes magic webbing, but Avocado can apparently take it or leave it.

Here's a bead with Avocado.  I'll add a few more pics to this post as I make more.

Test Results :: Red Copper Green

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - w/ Silver leaf, 4 - w/ Silver leaf - reduced, 5 - w/ Silver leaf - reduced & encased, 6 - w/ Terra frit, 7 - w/ Double Helix frit blend - reduced (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra), 8 - As a floral, 9 - w/ Dark Violet, 10 - w/ Black, 11 - w/ Ivory

I don't even know if it's possible for me to have a favourite colour, there are so many gorgeous colours out there. But if it -is- possible, Effetre Red Copper Green could possibly be it.

There are lots of colours these days that can be more than one colour at a time. Many of the specialty silver glasses are like that. But what I didn't even know I was looking for was a colour that is more than one colour at a time without requiring any extra work or stress from me at all the way those colours do.

Red Copper Green is misleadingly named because it is neither really red nor really green -- to me, it's more of a Magenta Turquoise. I guess whoever named the rods named them based on what they look like BEFORE you melt them, not what they look like AFTER you melt them. I only really care what happens after I melt a colour so I've been calling it Magenta Turquoise in my head for weeks.

General Impressions
I used to really love Copper Green, but now that I've met his cousin, I have lost interest a bit. Red Copper Green is more interesting, and it's a lot easier to work with. Anyone with repeated Copper Green encounters knows how sparky it is and how prone to pitting. Well, I didn't experience either of those nasty things with any of my Red Copper Green.

Alone, Red Copper Green is a streaky, soft Magenta/Turquoise mottle colour. (Bead #1) It's gorgeous with neutral colours like Ivory, and it has some affinity for silver and silver glass. Whether or not you reduce it, after working it for a while, Red Copper Green gets a light silvery sheen not unlike the dark gunge you get when you use regular Copper Green or Dark Turquoise, but in a much softer, shinier way.

I used it alone in a floral, and the mottle is really pretty in a petal. I expected it to look silly, but it's actually pretty nice. (Bead #8)

The second flower is a little harder to explain. It is also Red Copper Green, but it was created a little differently.  Firstly, it's over a base of Light Brown Transparent, and secondly, it was heated longer. Either Red Copper Green is a bit of a striker, or the metals in the Light Brown Transparent really did a number on it.  Or both. I am leaning towards it being the metal content of the base colour, which I'll talk about more when we get to the Reactions section.

Reduction
Reducing Red Copper Green turns it a dark, shiny magenta.  I don't like the colour you get when you reduce regular Copper Green, but I sort of like this.   (Bead #2)

I put some silver leaf on Bead #5 and then reduced and encased it, and I'm not impressed. The silver turned yellow, which I can't really think of a use for aesthetically, and the Red Copper Green got a little darker and stripier, but not in a way that I feel like I need.

Reactions
I put silver leaf on two Red Copper Green spacers and then reduced one of them, and frankly, apart from the silver on the one I reduced being just a little more yellow, there's not a lot of difference. However, just look at the colour that the Red Copper Green turned the silver. It's gorgeous, and yes, predictably, I am in love again.

These spacers are really dark, but I didn't make any conscious effort to strike them.  This is the main reason why I think that high metal content in an adjoining colour is the main cause of Red Copper Green darkening in colour.  If you look at the big picture at the top of the screen, you can see that every single one of the beads where the Red Copper Green significantly darkened, it was in a bead with high metal content colours or additives.

Red Copper Green also behaved really interestingly with Terra frit.  (Bead #6)  Around the edges of the Terra frit, there's a turquoise outline, which seems to be the metal that forms the red part of Red Copper Green fleeing away from the edges of the silver glass.  Towards the left side of the picture, the Red Copper Green even seems to be turning purple.  Wild.

This didn't happen so much with the other silver glass bead I made, so it might be something specific to the opaque 'strikers'... or maybe even something only Terra does. Clearly I won't know the answer to that until I play with it a little more, so it's a good thing I have a few rods left to experiment with before I run out of it completely.

I didn't get much strike out of the Terra, and I'm going to blame myself. But since I think I've sucked at it in equal measure for every bead I've made, I'm going to say that I think Red Copper Green is probably not a bad base for silver glass, but that if what you want is vibrant rainbow colours, there are probably better bases to use.

With Black, Red Copper Green seems to just lose its mind completely and writhe all over the place. It's gone all funky and curdled and patchy. I've seen regular Copper Green do this with TerraNova2. I wonder if Red Copper Green will too?

And with Ivory, Red Copper Green behaves very similarly to how regular Copper Green behaves with it.  The dark line that forms between the colours is a little finer than I remember the line between Ivory and Copper Green being, and of course, regular Copper Green doesn't get the magenta blushing.

Did I mention I'm in love?

Here are a couple of beads made with Red Copper Green: