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:

Test Results :: Medium Topaz

 

Effetre Medium Topaz (EFF014) is the colour of amber or maple syrup. Some vendors call it Root Beer.

This colour is part of a small family of topazes, which we can all appreciate because it is very nice to have a series of 3 or more tranparents that are all the same hue but at different saturation levels. We have to be more inventive to create this kind of graduated effect with other colours. I wish someone could do this with reds and oranges.

Because all of the great colours have more than one name, this one is also sometimes called Root Beer, so if you're looking for Medium Topaz and can't find it, that could be part of your problem.

Reducing Medium Topaz doesn't have any effect on it's colour.

In the rightmost bead, you can see Medium Topaz sitting smack between it's two cousins, Light Topaz and Dark Topaz.

Medium Topaz is a very vivid colour with reddish overtones, which is very appealing but maybe a little frustrating if what you really want is a medium brown colour. If you're facing this problem, consider choosing CiM Indian Summer  or CiM Maple instead, since they are less red but about the same level of saturation. Medium Topaz is brighter and more saturated than Reichenbach Amber, brighter than CiM Indian Summer, and significantly redder and darker than the old Vetrofond Streaky Topaz.

On top of Medium Topaz, silver spreads out and forms a brownish crust. When that crust is reduced and encased, it turns a bluish grey. Medium Topaz deadens silver. I encased silver foil in the rightmost bead, and usually I expect to see the silver glinting out at me with some intensity, whether the colour of it is changed or not. Medium Topaz seems to have eaten it.

Medium Topaz makes a very interesting base colour for reducing silver glass frit. I got interesting outlines around the fritty bits here, and I also got very nice colours in the frit. My TerraNova2 frit got some interesting colour in it, but everything is so dark in that bead that it seems like maybe the reaction between it and the Medium Topaz was too strong. I'll have to try this again and see what happens.

In my frit stringer test, I certainly got a reaction but instead of the blues and greens that I get with colours like Yellow, Straw Yellow, Mojito, and others I instead got a lot of grey and pale yellow with the barest hints of blue. This combined with its behaviour with silver makes me think that the Topaz family's reaction profile is a lot like that of an Ivory. That sort of makes sense based on the little I know about glass colouring and I can't help remembering that Ivory is sort of amberish when it's hot.

Medium Topaz lightens up considerably when used on top of other colours.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace all separated on top of Medium Topaz, but I didn't notice much in the way of reactions when the Medium Topaz was on top.

Here are some beads that include Medium Topaz:

Test Results :: Dark Emerald

Effetre Dark Emerald is a vibrant, pure medium green transparent. It is relatively inert with other colours -- even with Ivory it has only a very slight brown line reaction. I was expecting it to be more reactive than it is, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Here, you can see that reducing Dark Emerald makes no appreciable difference in itsappearance.

Dark Emerald does nothing with silver until you reduce and encase the silver - then you get faint bluish hints here and there that remind me of how silver interacts with the cobalt blues.

Dark Emerald seems to make a nice base for both reducing and striking silver glass.

And finally, here you can see how very non-reactive this colour is. You'll notice there's a weird, dark sooty line between the Ivory and Peace, but I think that is nothing to do with Dark Emerald and quite a lot to do with me needing to clean my torch head. Also, there was a batch of Peace that did this fairly easily a few years back, and it's possible that I still have a few rods of it mixed in with my newer stock.

And here are some fun beads with Dark Emerald.  On the whole, I think this colour is a bit brighter than I really like to work with. If I am going to use the rest of my stock, I think I will probably mix it with other transparent colours to see what I can do with it in blends.