First Look :: Avalon Milky & Avalon Misty

CiM Avalon Milky (CiM4003) and Avalon Misty (CiM4002) are soft, minty, pale green, translucent colours. They melt beautifully, with no bubbles or scumming. These glasses are really only different as regards their opacity, so I feel like it is makes sense to post about them together. In general, I typically prefer the misty colours to the milky ones because I enjoy the brightness of them, and this was true for me with Avalon as well.

You can clearly see here the difference between the milky and misty versions of this colour. They are both beautifully translucent, but the misty beads show just a bit brighter and lighter because more light is passing through them.

Silver Foil under Avalon turns an odd lemon yellow colour.

I decided to try this just because the silver foil turned a bit yellow, but it turns out that lemon yellow is not quite yellow enough to do anything impressive with the frit. These streaky results are pretty, but they are also achievable by using regular colours rather than the expensive silver glass ones, so I'll never do this again.

Here are some fun beads that I made with these colours. I'm not really sure which is which now, but you can rest assured that whichever of these colours you choose to buy, you're getting something pretty neat. The butterfly murrini were created by the lovely and talented Jackie Gundelfinger.

First Look :: Pink Pansy

CiM Pink Pansy (CiM930) is a medium transparent pink colour. The colour is a little warmer than what I typically get from CiM Cranberry or Effetre Rubino Oro, and a bit lighter in saturation than Cranberry (Rubino Oro varies from batch to batch, so it's hard to say something really definitive about it here). This colour does not require any special handling in the flame to develop its rich, pink colour.

Other testers have posted about this colour having a butterscotch aspect to it, but for one reason or another, I didn't really see that in my test beads.

Silver leaf isn't very interesting with Pink Pansy, and so I almost didn't bother doing the next test. I'm glad my fixed habits sometimes win out over my lazier impulses or I'd never discover anything good :)

Silver foil under Pink Pansy is a rich coppery gold. This is a really beautiful result, but the most exciting thing about it is that colours that turn a rich gold like this make gorgeous silver glass frit stringer.

This is Pink Pansy pulled into frit stringer using my random blend of TAG and Double Helix reduction colours. I've put it over a core of pink pansy in most of the beads, which is why you can see a lot of pink poking through. The beads on the very ends give you an idea what the stringer would look like without the pink core. 

And here is a fun pair I made. The base of these is Effetre Skyberry, and I've also used some CiM Mediterranean in here. The windows are made with aqua dicroic.

First Look :: Burnt Sugar

CiM Burnt Sugar (CiM733) is a brown transparent glass that is a pale brown in thin layers. Like all transparents, the more of it is bulked together, the darker it is. 

Burnt Sugar is a light brown transparent that fumes very dark with silver. Silver foil encased with this colour turns a rich bronze colour.

On top of Burnt Sugar, silver foil looks amazing. 

I love the way it crusts up on the surface, and when the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a blue-ish haze around it and looks quite magical.

Because Burnt Sugar does such amazing things with silver, I thought it might be a good candidate for using with silver glass frit in stringer, but unfortunately the reaction is so strong that the results are too dark to be interesting.

I'll show you two other tests like this from the new batch of colours in future posts, and you'll see what I was hoping for here in one of them.

This colour melts like butter, and although it is possible to boil it if you hold a thin stringer directly in the flame, it is very nice to work with. In thin layers, it is a gorgeous pale brown, and in thicker layers, a deep brown. The denser the Burnt Sugar, the darker a bead made entirely of Burnt Sugar will appear.

Here's Burnt Sugar in a group with many of the other colours from this batch of Limited Runs: