Test Results :: Ghee

This interesting colour is CiM Ghee.  It is a striking colour that deepens and darkens in colour the more you strike it, changing from a yellow just slightly brighter than Effetre Yellow Opalino (but just as translucent) to a rich, amber/caramel opal colour after repeated heating and cooling cycles.

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

The main differences between Yellow Opalino and Ghee are:

• Ghee strikes to a more opaque/opal dark caramel colour, where Yellow Opalino strikes to become more opaque, but doesn't really change colour.
• The two glasses have different reactions with other colours, even though their reactions with silver and with Ivory are mostly the same.
  

The reactions that Ghee has with silver are also fairly similar to the reactions with silver that I experienced with Yellow Opalino. Silver turns a strange pinkish brown colour when used on top of Ghee, and when the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a pink and silver blanket that is iridescent under the clear.
 

So, with silver glass, I didn't have anything really exciting happen with Ghee.  In the leftmost bead, you can see that the Ghee has gone darker and more caramelly and it's not really clear to me whether this happened because I reduced the bead and it struck as a result of temperature change or if it was because of the silver in the silver glass frit.

I didn't get great results from my striking silver glass frit on top of Ghee, either, but please keep in mind that I am terrible at striking silver glass and that really the point of that test is to find the base colours where the glass does all the work and I just have to watch the magic. Ghee is not one of those base colours.

In the rightmost bead, I used frit stringer which I created by dipping Ghee into my silver glass reduction frit and pulling it out into thick stringer. Then, I wrapped that frit stringer around a core of Ghee and encased the whole mess with Clear. I got pretty colours, but overall I am not very pleased with the effect because with Ghee it is sort of ragged. I also didn't get all of the Ghee covered, and the yellow of the Ghee doesn't really go all that well with the blue and green of the frit. Since it's sort of hard to get 100% encasement coverage with stringer, I prefer to use this technique with colours that coordinate more nicely so that mistakes don't look as awful.
 

With Tuxedo, Ghee doesn't really do anything interesting. There is no reaction when Tuxedo is used on top of it and it largely disappears on top of Tuxedo.

With Copper Green, a light turquoise line appears wherever Copper Green and Ghee touch. You can see that the copper green has separated into bands of light and dark turquoise and that in some places, a dark line also formed. I don't know what caused that and it didn't happen consistently, so more experimentation would be required to be able to provide more information about that.

Ghee makes Opal Yellow separate. When Ghee is used on top of Opal Yellow, a faint halo of Opal Yellow pops up around it. When Opal Yellow is used on top of Ghee, a translucent line appears in the middle of Opal Yellow stringer lines and translucent, darker dots form in the middle of Opal Yellow dots.

Ivory and Ghee have a dark line reaction that is more pronounced when Ivory is used on top of Ghee, but still evident the other way around. Because Ghee is translucent, on top of Ivory it looks grey because of this reaction. A very strange colour of grey, too.

The reaction that occurs between Peace and Ghee is very similar to what happens with Opal Yellow only much less dramatic. Also, because Ghee is translucent, when layered on top of Peace it becomes a super-bright yellow.

Here is a goddess made with Ghee. It's my first sculptural piece with Ghee, and I can see that making anything nice with it using it this way would require some practice in order to get it to strike uniformly, or in order to spot-strike it intentionally. You can see here, though, the dramatic colour change that can be achieved through repeated heating and cooling.

Test Results :: Silver Pink

Whenever I use Effetre Silver Pink, I am struck by what a nice, calm colour it is. The rods can be a touch shocky because it is hand-pulled, but it plays nicely with so many colours and is so subtle and pretty that any fleeting irritation from the shockiness can be gotten over pretty quickly.

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

Some batches of Silver Pink strike more readily than others, but the batch I currently have seems to strike fairly dramatically. I need to do a bit more experimenting because when I look at my test beads I can see that whether or not the Silver Pink strikes seem to depend somewhat on what it has been layered over top of.

Silver Pink fumes a yellowish colour when silver is added to it.  In the bead on the right, you can see that the Silver Pink struck to a deep purplish rose colour under the silver when I encased it.

Here you can see the Silver Pink looking sort of yellow around the silver again.  The yellow is more pronounced in the bead on the left, which was reduced with silver glass reduction frit on it.  In the bead on the right, my TerraNova2 frit didn't really strike very nicely (probably a "me problem"), and you can see that the edges of the frit look distinctly yellowish.

The silver pink struck to a dusty rose colour on top of Opal Yellow and to a gentle baby pink on top of Tuxedo, but refused to strike at all on top of Ivory, Copper Green, and Peace. I wasn't expecting Silver Pink to strike at all, so this turned out to be a bit of a surprise as well as a puzzle that needs to be solved. I wonder why it strikes so much more strongly and readily on top of Opal Yellow?

The only other two reactiony things I observed in these test beads were that a dark line forms between Opal Yellow and Silver Pink which is much more pronounced when the Opal Yellow is used over the Silver Pink, and that Peace has no staying power over top of Silver Pink and goes almost transparent. So very strange.

Below, you can see in the goddess bead that she is a mottled pale and powder pink because the glass has struck irregularly. I like this effect, but I wasn't really expecting it, and if what I had wanted was to make a bead that was a uniform colour, this would have been disappointing.

The set is a trio of kitchen sink organics that also feature Laushca Hawaiian Purple and Fine Silver Leaf, as well as a bunch of other stuff that I don't remember.  The goddess bead was made last year but the organics are from April 2010.

Test Results :: Golden

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced), 5 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 6 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 7 - Over Silver Foil, 8 - As Silver Glass Frit Stringer (encased), 9 & 10 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace

I have a soft spot for the Kugler Beadmaking 104 colours, and Kugler Golden is one of those colours that is so pretty to look at in the rod that you don't even really want to melt it. Golden is the only 104 COE Pink that I have found so far that does not turn Ivory black. I think that this means that it doesn't have any silver or copper in it, but what exactly -is- in it is anyone's guess.

Golden is a pretty soft colour, and is butter-smooth to melt.

Golden strikes darker, the longer you work it. The bead on the right here was reduced after cooling.  I don't think it's the extra propane that causes the colour change, but rather the repeated heating. My goddess bead (below, after the colour tests) holds up this theory.

Here, the silver leaf has made the Golden itself go really dark, and then in the bead on the left, it's turned a brown, coppery colour but in some places has also turned blue or slightly iridescent. In the bead on the right, you can see that if the silver is encased you get a smooth, silvery blanket  under the Clear that is fumed blue at its edges. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, it's not a good idea to encase Golden, and that bead cracked in multiple places.

I got beautiful colour from both reducing silver glass frit and striking silver glass frit on top of Golden.

 

I also got great results with my Golden silver glass frit stringer here in the bead on the left. I love the colours I got and the weird grunginess of the effect. However, this bead also cracked in numerous places. I used Golden in the core, then frit stringer made with Golden and Double Helix frit, and then encased the bead with either Effetre 006 or the new Vetreria Soiva Clear. I'm not sure which Clear, but it doesn't really matter, because Golden has cracked every time I have ever encased it with any Clear, even just in dots.

In the bead on the right, you can see that Golden over Silver Foil results in a beautiful, shiny, pinkish coppery colour. I used Golden as the core of this bead, burnished on a couple of layers of Silver Foil, and then encased it with Golden.

So, in spite of how cool and reactive Golden is with silver, it is dull, dull, dull in terms of reactions with other colours. I don't think there's a single thing about these beads that I could pin on a reaction between Golden and one of the other colours.

This goddess bead is made with Golden.

I also did some messing around with colour mixing, because I wanted to prove to myself whether Golden just has an encasement problem or if it's a deeper, more concerning compatibility issue.  I haven't done any fancy polariscope testing, but after my colour mixing experiments below, I tend to believe that the problem with Golden is a problem with encasing it, because, weeks later, none of these beads have any cracking issues.

KUG Golden : EFF Dark Aqua (1:1)

This came out stranger than it looks. First, the Golden and Dark Aqua have only sort of blended together, so you can see clouds of pinkishness lurking in the depths of the bead when you look at it in person. Then, there's all the bubbles, which must have been my fault... but, why don't all of the other colours have bubbles, too, if that's the case? I don't think I did anything differently here. 

KUG Golden : EFF Ivory (1:2)

All of the other pinks I have used with Ivory have turned Ivory black. I wonder why Golden doesn't? I really expected this mixture to be terrible, but instead, it is very pretty and streaky, sort of like cotton candy.

KUG Golden : EFF Opal Yellow (1:1)

Of course. Light yellow plus pink makes a reddish black. I knew that.

KUG Golden : EFF Copper Green (1:1)

Strangely both not green and not golden. If anyone knows why the combination of these two colours creates a gross streaky black/grey colour, I'm interested.

KUG Golden : KUG Light Beige (aka ASK Moroccan Swirl) (2:1)

The rod I used was labelled 'Moroccan Swirl' with an ASK color number. Moroccan Swirl is apparently not all that opaque, but certainly lightens the colour of the Golden when combined with it this way. I also like the weird streakiness.

I need to work on my colour mixing technique, because I must have captured a lot of air mixing some of these colours.

Mixing colours is fun! If you haven't yet attempted it, though, here's a warning. Mixing colours takes a while. I wasted hours screwing around with these at the torch, and it's oddly addictive, so I'm sure that I'll be toileting more time on this type of activity again soon.