Test Results :: Middle Blue

Reichenbach Middle Blue (RL3018) is a pretty light aqua. The rods I had seemed to be seeded with itty bitty bubbles, which I found a little odd. There were too many, too consistently through the rods for it to be an accident (or maybe not?) and the result is sort of pretty, unless what you want is a smooth, bubble-free transparent aqua.

This colour, or at least this batch of this colour, was very stiff -- much stiffer than the other transparents I've tried from this line. Possibly because of this difference in viscosity, I had some dramatic incompatibility issues with this colour, which you'll see as we go through the tests.

Middle Blue darkens a little if you reduce it. I was trying to get it to turn red, but it refused to do that.

The left half of this bead was Effetre Light Aqua, and the right half was Reichenbach Middle Blue. You can see a compatibility crack around the middle of this bead where the two colours meet.

Middle blue is not terribly reactive with silver, although I got some yellow fuming in the middle bead which may be as much due to the Clear as the Middle Blue.

The middle bead is a core of Middle Blue, rolled in silver, and encased with Effetre Clear after reducing the silver. I'm not sure you can see all of the cracks in the bead from the picture above, so I included a photo of the bead in the two pieces that it divided itself into, below.

This kind of cracking can only be from incompatibility, so this batch of Middle Blue is clearly not a great fit for using with other 104 CoE colours unless you can find some with a comparably stiff viscosity. If you do plan use this colour with other glasses, make sure you do some pre-production testing first.

Middle Blue was not particularly interesting with either my reduction frit blend or my TerraNova2 frit.

Middle Blue is not a very reactive colour, but I did get some dark line reaction with Ivory. The most interesting thing about this reaction was that it happened when I used the Middle Blue on top of the Ivory, but not when I used the Ivory on top of the Middle Blue. I think this is because the reaction is fairly gentle and happens where the two colours meet, but isn't strong enough to wrap the edges. It's only visible through the Middle Blue because it is transparent.

I didn't make any surviving beads with this colour. I tried a goddess with some frit, but it is cracked all through. here's a photo of it anyway.

Test Results :: Steel Blue

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ White

Lauscha Steel Blue has to be one of the most interesting opaque colours I've tried. I love Lauscha Cocoa and Lauscha Olive as well, but the hue of Steel Blue does something to me. All three of these are interesting to work with -- stiff while you are melting them, but spreading wildly on top of other glasses, translucence on top of some colours, and fun with silver glass.

The addition of silver is a transformative experience for Steel Blue, making it look completely unlike itself.  Here, in the bead on the left you can see that the silver has turned gold, and wisps and webs its way over the surface of the bead.  You can also see, in that same bead, how the Steel Blue itself has gone super-dark, except in a couple of areas where the silver has blown a royal blue blush through it.  In the bead on the right, the silver leaf was reduced and encased, and all of the visible Steel Blue looks more of a royal blue colour than Steel Blue's typical, deeper hue.  Also in that bead, the silver has taken on a dull greyish-lavender colour.

Steel Blue makes a very interesting base colour for silver glass. My TerraNova2 frit did all kinds of pretty blue and purple things on top of Steel Blue, and the reducing silver glass frit just went sort of crazy, and turned the visible surface of the Steel Blue base a kind of oily teal colour.  Nifty.  I particularly like the way the reducing silver glass frit has bloomed on top of the Steel Blue.

There is no noticeable reaction between Steel Blue and Tuxedo.

I love colours that make Copper Green do this.  A lighter, turquoise line springs up around Copper Green wherever it touches Steel Blue.  Also, the Steel Blue stringer lines and dots spread a bit on top of Copper Green and have more translucency than you'd expect. Some magical ingredient in th Steel Blue prevents Copper Green from getting that shiny, metallic patina on it, too. Other colours that spring to mind that are this much fun with Copper Green include Lauscha Cocoa, Lauscha Faded Rose, CiM Charcoal, CiM Ming (in it's own wacky way), REI Mystic Grey-Blue, Lauscha Olive and CiM Slytherin, although that's hardly a definitive list.  What do all of these colours have in common?  Good question.  Apart from how much they love Copper Green, I have no idea.

Opal Yellow is seriously yellow with Steel Blue.  And curdly when used underneath it.

On top of Steel Blue, Ivory gets a fine translucent line in the middle of stringer lines and translucent pinpricks in the centre of dots.  On top of Ivory, Steel Blue spreads out, a lot, and feathers its colour out into the Ivory base.  This is almost identical to the reactions I got with Lauscha Olive and Lauscha Cocoa when I used them with Ivory.

Nothing interesting to report with regard to White reactions except that when you use White on top of Steel Blue, be prepared for the White to look more blue than white, because the Steel Blue will bleed up through it and change its colour.

Here is a fun bead made with Steel Blue.  I've been using Steel Blue a lot in twisties and other organics, and I think I have a few other pictures I can include once I get the rest of my beads photographed.

Test Results :: Pale Ink Blue

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - w/ Silver foil, 4 - Over Clear, 5 - w/ Silver foil - reduced & encased, 6 - w/ Khaos frit, 7 - w/ Silver glass frit blend (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra) - reduced, 8 - w/ Ivory, 9 - w/ Copper Green

The first question I have, for whoever it was that named this colour, is "What exactly is so pale about Effetre Pale Ink Blue?" Even over Clear, it isn't what I would term 'pale'. In my opinion, it is of 'medium' saturation, and putting it over Clear lightens it up enough that I'd call it 'light'. But, semantics aside, I have grown really fond of this colour and its cousins, Ink Blue and Violet Ink Blue, over the last year or so.

Dwyn Tomlinson posted not long ago about this little colour family, noting that even though all three colours have different names, they aren't really all that different. And I remember having a conversation with someone at the Frantz Bash last year and being told that they are all the same formula, just with slightly (really slightly!) different hue outcomes. This is good news for me, because although I am almost out of Pale Ink Blue, I still have some of the regular stuff, and a bunch of the Violet variety.

General Impressions
The closer a colour is to cobalt, the less likely I am to want any because I really shy away from primary colours, so it's a good thing that Pale Ink Blue has a healthy infusion of purple and is just muted enough to not scare me away.

I didn't get great colour out of Khaos with it, but I used it with a couple of other silver glasses, and I got much nicer results with those. The first bead, below, is Reichenbach Magic over Pale Ink Blue, and the second one is Double Helix R170 over Pale Ink Blue.

 

Reduction
Reducing Pale Ink Blue (Bead #2) had no effect.

Reactions
Pale Ink Blue doesn't seem to really react with silver strongly, making it a nice, neutral medium transparent colour to use silver with. You can see in Bead #3 how the silver just sort of crusted up and stayed on the surface. If you compare this to how the silver behaved with Pale Green Apple, you can really see a difference -- With the Pale Green Apple, it kind've spread over the surface and beaded up, but on the Pale Ink Blue, it just sits in place and gets all crusty.

The most interesting thing that happened as a result of reducing silver foil on top of Pale Ink Blue and then encasing it was how the blue around the silver changed colour and became a little softer and brighter.  The second most interesting thing was the way the silver developed that opaque, blankety look.  I'm starting to wonder whether or not silver will always do this on top of a transparent colour, because it happened for me with Great Bluedini and Pale Green Apple as well.  I guess I'll find out more as I go through the rest of my colours.

I made a complete mess of the Khaos frit on Bead #6, but if you go and look at my test results for any other colour, you will see varying degrees of success (which I attribute to the base colour, not to myself).  Because I had good luck with Pale Ink Blue and other 'striking' colors, I'm going to hypothesize that either I am most of the problem here, or that Khaos just doesn't like Pale Ink Blue as a base color.  I need to buy a rod of Khaos and see if this is just an issue between me and the frit, or if the rod and I will have similar issues.

The frit blend in Bead #7 looks awesome on Pale Ink Blue though.  The reduced frit looks greener on Pale Ink Blue than it did on Pale Green Apple.

When I combined Ivory and Pale Ink Blue, where the Ivory is over top of the Ink Blue, it did the slight spreading / translucent line thing that it seems to like to do over transparent colours but it also curdled a little in an unattractive way. (Bead #8) You can see it doing the same thing on the other side of the bead where the Pale Ink Blue is over the Ivory. Now I know why the flowers I tried to make with Ivory and Pale Ink Blue came out looking so hideous.

I can't blame this on the softness of the Ivory, because when I used Pale Ink Blue with Silver Pink, I didn't have this problem (Silver Pink is uber-soft too).  It is nice, though, that there is a blue that you can use with Ivory without getting that dark line reaction.

Over Copper Green, the edges of the Pale Ink Blue (Bead #9) have a darker, turquoisy outline while the middle appears to be a light periwinkle.  I really like this combination.  The Copper Green didn't do anything nice over the Pale Ink Blue at all.

Here are some other beads made with Pale Ink Blue, some old and some new:

     

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 :: Pajama Blue

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - w/ Silver foil, 4 - w/ Silver foil - reduced & encased, 5 - w/ Khaos frit, 6 - w/ Silver glass frit (Gaia, Elektra2, Nyx) - reduced, 7 - as a floral, 8 - w/ Tuxedo, 9 - w/ Copper Green, 10 - w/ Ivory

Vetrofond Pajama Blue is a soft baby blue that is a little more muted in tone than Effetre Light Sky Blue.  I prefer more muted hues, so this made me pretty happy.  It isn't magical with silver glass, but I am finding that it makes a good base for organics because it is generally silver friendly and the way it subtly reduces to diffuse pink/red is really interesting.

I realized last week that it is better to put the pictures ahead of the text in each paragraph, so I've started doing it that way.  If I develop a compulsive need to make them all that way consistently, you might notice some changes in my previous test result entries.

General Impressions
Pajama Blue is a litle stiffer than Effetre Light Sky Blue, which I prefer -- the soupier a colour is, the less likely I am to have success shaping it.  It behaves almost identically with other colours to what you would expect Light Turquoise or Copper Green to do, and the soft, muted blue colour of it is really pretty.  The colour is faintly streaky, which I also enjoy.

Reduction

When you reduce Pajama Blue, it develops a soft, diffuse, red/pink reduction film.   (Bead #2)  I like that the reduction creates such a soft effect... it's much more subtle and attractive than what happens when you reduce turquoises.

Reactions

Silver doesn't do much to change the colour of Pajama Blue (or anything else at all really) while it's sitting on top of it. And if you look at Bead #3, you can see that the silver has stayed more in place and is forming a smooth layer over the Pajama Blue.  In Bead #4, I think my Clear caused some of the yellowing, but similarly to how I felt when I did this test with Red Copper Green, the results leave me certain I don't need to ever reduce silver and encase it over this colour again.

This is a little different than what I've seen in colours like Seashell Swirl, where the silver balled up and left brown remains everywhere or Tamarind Unique #1 which seemed to make it crust up on the surface of the glass. I need to explore the net differences between those two silver reactions at some point, but in the meantime I'm also contemplating this third sort of behaviour.  I think it means that Pajama Blue will make a good base for organics, and possibly not the best base for silver glass.

You can see in Bead #5 that I still haven't solved my Khaos problem, but frankly, I don't think the base colour was giving me a lot of help here. The reduced silver glass frit bead (Bead #6) didn't even really come out looking all that great, and those have been consistently attractive in my other colour tests. Even Dark Violet did more interesting things with my reduced silver glass frit than Pajama Blue did.

I don't know if it will do this with Effetre or Vetrofond Black, but Tuxedo bleeds into Pajama Blue and the bleed is a sort of electric blue-purple in colour. (Bead #8) It's really cool, although I still haven't managed to think of an instance where I'd want to make it happen on purpose.

And isn't this interesting... I didn't expect Pajama Blue and Copper Green to have a reaction, but they totally did. (Bead #9) Where I put the Copper Green over Pajama Blue, it separated and you can see how it is lighter around the outside and darker in the middle. Where the Pajama Blue is on top of the Copper Green, you can see the Copper Green has developed a darker turquoise outline around it.  I think it's also worth noticing that although I didn't do anything special to it, this Copper Green bead doesn't have dark silvery stuff all over it the way a lot of my other Copper Green test beads do.

And finally, with Ivory, Pajama Blue develops a dark line in the same way that all blues and turquoises seem to.  The difference with Pajama Blue is that the line is more grey than it is black, and spreads a little.  I rather like the softness of it.

I only had a chance to make one 'fun bead' with Pajama Blue, but I'll post more as they pop out of the kiln.

 

Test Results :: Ocean

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Blend (reduced),  6 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 7 - w/ Copper Green, 8 - w/ Opal Yellow, 9 - w/ Ivory, 10 - w/ White, 11 - As a Floral (over White) 

General Impressions
Reichenbach Ocean (RL1012B) seems to be a veiled cane. I am theorizing that it is a core of Clear encased in a rich, dense transparent Blue, and then encased in Clear again. It's easy to see why I think that the whole cane is clear-cased when you look at a rod of Ocean, but the theory that it is clear-cored as well comes from a fun effect I observed in some of the beads I've made with it.

This 'fun effect' happens when you use it without mucking up the end of the rod and squishing it all together -- i.e. getting the whole end hot but not so molten that it gathers and folds in on itself. It's fun to draw ribbon-like stripes of it around a bead that is encased, and then encase over it to magnify. It looks like transparent blue ribbons, each with a darker blue outline. It's the darker blue outline that has me convinced that the rods are cored with clear. This colour makes me want to make veiled cane out of all of my densely saturated transparent colours, so I guess we'll be seeing some of that on this blog in the future.

I read somewhere (but have no idea where it might have been) that both Ocean and Antique Green are variations on the Reichenbach Soft Crystal, which I have not yet used because I also read (again, not sure exactly where) that the Soft Crystal has some compatibility issues with other 104 glass, but I am happy to report that I have not had any cracking issues at all with Ocean.

Ocean seems, when you look at the rods, like it might have some mica flecks or sparklies in it, but there is no evidence of this in any of my finished beads. My favourite beads so far with this colour all use Ocean fairly sparingly, over White or in an encased focal surrounded by Clear.

Reactions
I haven't done any of my colour tests with Clear -- Reichenbach or any other, so I can't say with any certainty whether the reactions noted here are unique to Ocean or if they might also be reactions you'd get with Reichenbach Soft Crystal and/or other Clears. Someone with some extra time on their hands could try it and let us know :)

Silver leaf goes sort of filmy and leaves greyish brown smears when melted into Ocean. When it is reduced and encased, the film becomes shinier and more interesting-looking, but doesn't really do much in the way of fun things.

I didn't really expect much from Ocean with silver glass, but both my reduction frit blend and my TerraNova2 frit seem to love this colour. I got nice colour from the TerraNova2, and the reduction frit looks nice on it as well. One of the things I like about this testing is that the glass always surprises me.

Ocean leeches the colour out of Copper Green and keeps it from doing that dark grey-green metallic thing that Copper Green so loves to do. You can see in the middle of this bead and around the dots and lines on the left-hand side how around the Ocean, the colour in the Copper Green sort of flees from the Ocean like it's afraid to get wet. On top of Ocean, the Copper Green separates so that it is lighter around the edges and darker in the middle.

Ocean doesn't really react with Opal Yellow at all, but I love how the stringer dots and lines have a dark blue edge. This is because of the nature of Ocean, not because of a reaction, but it's still pretty neat.

On top of Ivory, the blue in Ocean turns brown in a similar fashion to what happens with other blues and greens like Light Teal and Light Aqua except in a less uniform way. On top of Ocean, Ivory seems to flee to the middle of the dots and lines in a similar way to what happened with the Copper Green.

 

In a floral over white, you can really see the streaky results of using Ocean as stringer. The effect is messy, but still interesting. White thins a bit on the outside of the dots and lines, similar to what happened with Ivory only less strongly. There is no noticeable reaction when Ocean is used over White.

I've had quite a bit of fun with Ocean so far. Here's a little Ocean eye-candy.