Grandmas and Christmas Colors

Hey, I know it's nowhere near Christmas-time yet, but I am in the mood to share something festive and sweet.

Around the winter holidays, I start to reminisce about family - and especially grandmas. See, in my family, grandmas are all about Christmas - pageants, skits, dressing up in adorable holiday-themed costumes, and of course.....singing. Oh, the singing! I have about a million cassette tapes with holiday songs sung by various family members as children and adults. Listening to them brings up precious memories and feelings of sweet nostalgia. And maybe a tiny bid of sheepish embarrassment at being taped singing completely off-key. But it makes the grandmas so happy.

So whenever I start working in holiday color schemes while making beads, I always have my grandmas and great-grandmas on my mind.

This year, I got to start the Christmas color schemes early. My Grandma Betty (my mom's mom) asked me last month if I would make her a holiday-themed beaded charm for her to give to her long-time friend for her birthday in late November. Of course I said yes!

Grandma and her best friend Verna met when they were just 7 or 8 years old. They went to school together in a place called Manti, Utah. They lost touch after being friends for a long time, and Grandma says she ran into Verna again when they were in their 60's. Now they are best friends again - what a small world!

So Grandma wanted something special for her good friend - something unique and meaningful. Verna's birthday is later this month, and Grandma says she puts up a tiny Christmas tree for the holidays around that time. So a handmade charm would be perfect for Verna.

I smiled the whole time I made beads for this charm, because I can just see the grandmas of the family in these colors - cheerful red, snow white and fresh green. The fact that the charm is to be given as a gift to a dear friend of Grandma's just makes it sweeter.

So Verna - happy birthday! I hope this charm makes you smile. I am happy that my wonderful Grandma Betty has such a good friend.

Question

Hey all! I have a question for you....

I have been thinking about starting a personal blog for awhile now. But keeping up with two blogs might be a bit much for me. So I am wondering - should I mesh the this business/bead/color oriented blog with more personal notes? Or do you guys even really want to read anything personal?

Should I keep this blog totally on topic, or would it be interesting to any of you to see more stuff here about my life? Would you just skip over the personal stuff to get to the bead/color/glass related posts?

I'd love to know your thoughts - please feel free to post in the comments one way or another, and why, if you like. Thanks for reading!

Glass Testing: CiM 487 Poison Apple

If I was going to love an opal translucent CiM color, this one would be it. Poison Apple is a gorgeous color - very bright and really tempting to eat.
Of course I will probably be in the minority when I say that I really like that this color goes opaque in the kiln.

Poison Apple glass is really a dream to work with, and that's one of the reasons I will probably buy more of it. I generally don't stick with translucent colors because they are hard to layer, but this color is one exception.

The glass itself has a wonderful consistency and is easy to pull into stringer and wrap on the mandrel. I had no issues with cracking or annealing temperature. (some translucents need a different annealing schedule).

I really love that this color is so vivid it's almost neon. Even after annealing, the color is bright and almost animated. The shade of green reminds me a little bit of Effetre Nile Green, but with more saturation and slightly more yellowish. It's not as yellow as Pea Green. When compared to Elphaba, Poison Apple is slightly darker and has more blue. So it sits between those colors and has more saturation than all of them.

As for the transparency - Poison Apple looks great encased - nice and opaque, mostly without streaks, and not as dense as most opaques are. As a base, it has a few streaks, but is really a delicious color. When used as stringer decoration and melted in, it had a typical separation line, like in many opaque greens in the 104 glass line.

When layered, it does tend to stay more translucent/transparent, even after a cycle in the kiln. This means that it retains a kind of glow when used in raised florals - some of it goes opaque and some of it stays translucent. It's very pretty, but not as dense as I would normally like.

The bottom line is that this color is so gorgeous I might stray away from my otherwise strict (and slightly snobby) adherence to pure, stable glass. But mostly as a base or in florals, and not as much as a layering glass (line in encased florals or stripes). It might be fun to try this in an encased stringer though....Yey!!

Glass Testing: CiM 586 Mermaid

CiM Mermaid - here's another color I would really love to like! Actually, I do love the color - it's a deep opaque teal that doesn't occur in any other 104 glass line that I know of. It's deeper than the Effetre Ocean Green we all love, and bluer than Effetre Petroleum.

What I don't like is the workability of this glass. This is one of the first times I have been disappointed in the quality of one of CiM's colors. However, I only have one thin rod of this, so there's a chance it's a fluke.

One of the first things I have noticed is that this rod of Mermaid was incredibly shocky - even more so than most of Effetre's handpulled stuff. Mermaid cracked down the rod when I tried to heat it - even after a quick pre-heat in the kiln. The tip kept splintering, so it was hard to get a gather going to pull stringer. It was virtually impossible to use this as a base for encased stringer - which is really what I wanted to do with such a dark, saturated color.

I also noticed that this glass is stiff and melts in kind of a clumpy way. You can see that a bit in the swatch above.

Mermaid did make gorgeous spacers, though - once I was able to wind it wround the mandrel. It's streaky and seperates quite a lot, which can be pretty in the right application.

When encasing a base bead, I noticed that Mermaid bleeds a lot - coming out under the enges near the hole, even after I pushed the clear over it as much as possible.

These things make it hard for me to use this pretty color as a layering glass. As a base, it's probably great, as long as it's not encased.

I will ask and hold out hope that CiM reformulates this color so that it's more stable. Otherwise, it's yet another of the dozens of highly reactive, persnickity glass colors other glass lines have been flooding us with lately. Boy I'm grouchy. :)

**Edited to add: Seems like from what everyone is telling me here and in other places I might have gotten a bad rod of Mermaid. So as soon as I can get my hands on more, I will re-test it and hopefully it won't be shocky for me. If it's nice and stable, I will be one happy lampworker!

Glass Testing: CiM 788 Mink

I really want to like this color. Seriously, because I generally love any shade of brown! However, CiM's opal Mink just does not do it for me.

How, this kind of criticism is not meant to state that this color is bad for anyone who works with glass....it's not. It's a relatively stable, easy to work with color that is fine for anyone who likes to work with translucent glass. I'm just not one of those people.

If this color were opaque, I might like it. But the translucency makes it look slimy and kind of puts me in mind of slugs or snails. Now, being from the Pacific Northwest, you'd think I would love slugs! But, no. Ew. So there's an ick factor with this color that makes me really not want to use it in any bead I would make.

Now, I did see a horse bead on CiM's site made with this color and it's actually not bad looking. Still a bit on the slimy side, but if you're into making sculptural beads or organics, this might be the glass for you.


Some of CiM's opal colors do go opaque in the kiln, but this isn't one of them. It stays a dark, translucent brownish grey.

I will say that I found the glass itself to be easy to melt and easy to work with, so that's a plus!

Glass Testing: CiM 483 Slytherin

I kind of wish CiM's newest green Slytherin was called Perfect Pine! For one, we wouldn't have to worry about JK Rowling's lawyers seeing the name, and for another, it is the perfect shade of deep pine green.

I really love this color, so it's going to be hard to come up with any constructive criticism. :)

When I got my hands on some Slytherin, it at first reminded me a little of Effetre's transparent Sage Green. At a closer look though, you can see that Slytherin is a little more olivine in tone, making it a wonderful shade for autumn color schemes!

Slytherin has a wonderful consistency - not too stiff and relatively little in the way of bubbles or scum. It was a dream to use in encased stringer. The stability of this color is also really nice - no reactions, reductions or bleeding as far as I can see.

This is a very dark color, so it's really not a good one for a thick base...you can see that even in a small spacer, Slytherin does not transmit a lot of light, making it appear black or intensely dark green.

Therefore, Slytherin works best as a layering color. Really the only thing I can think of to improve on this pretty green is the fact that it does lose some of its dark intensity when encased. The green lightens up quite a bit as you can see here in this encased flower bead. It's still very pretty though. Here it's layered on top of Dirty Martini and encased in Diamond Clear.

A thicker layer of this glass without an encasement yields a gorgeous shade of pine that looks great on raised florals and is stunning over Dirty Martini as an encased stringer. I really love it here!






CiM says Slytherin was created as a green version of Leaky Pen, which I think was quite successful. You can see it here - this set was made with Slytherin, Dirty Martini, Leaky Pen and Fremen - all CiM colors - and Precision Diamond Clear. They look lovely together. Yey CiM!

Miscellaneous Color Stuff

I haven't torched in two weeks. I've been either sick or traveling to family events, so my poor studio has been sorely neglected.

However, I am feeling better now and am just chomping at the bit to melt more glass.

I just got some more stuff from CiM to test and write about, so I will be working on that in the coming weeks, along with more testing for Frantz. Before I get to that, though, I have a couple of random stuff to talk about.

First off, I was saddened to find out that the CiM color Tamarind is no longer available in its original form. I wrote about that gorgeous caramel brown last month. I LOVE that color. I have no idea why it's not being made anymore, but I plan to ask CiM the next time I email them.
Currently, you can get something called CiM Tamarind Unique, which looks to be much lighter and more of a putty color. Since CiM already has several similar shades like this (such as khaki, stone ground, and others) I am unsure as to why they are selling this version of Tamarind. Maybe it's a fluke - who knows. But I will be finding out - and I will try my best to talk them into offering Tamarind in its original form. There's no other color even close to the original in any other brand, so hopefully CiM will follow my advice. (oh, please, oh, please!)

CiM's latest colors that I got in my test packet look really interesting. However, only one of them is opaque (called Mermaid, which looks really promising), and two of them seem more translucent or opal (called Poison Apple and Mink).

I may be in the minority here, but I am really not enthusiastic about all the semi-transparent colors that have been coming out lately from CiM and others. Colors that are neither transparent or really opaque are all but useless for me. As pretty as they are, I can only really use them for spacers. They don't layer well and tend to be persnickity in the kiln (meaning they can sometimes crack if you don't follow a specified kiln program that may or may not work with the rest of your regular 104 COE glass).

I know a lot of people use these opal colors for their bases - My friend Kim Affleck does this really well. However, I work very small and just don't like using these colors as a base. It's just personal preference, I guess. So if you see me review these opal colors with less of a positive attitude, that's why. It's not that these colors aren't perfectly fine in general. It's more that I don't see them working for me specifically.

Here's what I look for in glass for my own particular tastes:

For opaque colors, I like them to be very dense (no tendency to turn translucent at all) so that I can layer them.

For transparent colors, I like lots of clarity (no tendency to cloud up or opacify, even if it's a striking color) again for layering.

Lack of reduction effects unless I am specifically looking for a particular kind of reduction - such as with DH Aurae and its silver reflective coating.

Lack of reaction - I prefer a stable glass that doesn't react to other glass unless I am looking for a particular effect (such as Rubino's spreading or Ivory's feathering)

True color - glass that stays close to the color as the rod even when layered. I like dark colors to stay dark and light colors to retain their color and not fade completely out. I also prefer my opaques to stay as vivid as they are without greying or washing out.

Stability - glass that isn't shocky, doesn't striate, doesn't scum or bubble, doesn't turn muddy, doesn't crack when encased, etc.

Basically, I am a color purist. So that's what I look for when I test new colors, and those colors get the best reviews from me. Snobby, I am sure, but I know what I like. :)

One last thing - and this is completely shameless and self-serving, so feel free to ignore.
I've been sick and unable to make beads lately, so I am completely broke. So if you have ever wanted to buy one of my tutorials from Coloraddiction, now would be a great time. They're available on the main site, and also on Etsy. It would be so helpful to me, and hopefully helpful to you too. I would be forever grateful! Thank you. :)

SALE! Buy one of my tutorials, get one of equal or lesser value free! Just let me know which one you would like in the notes section of your order. Sale ends Saturday, October 3, 2009.

Glass Testing: Effetre 414 Butternut

Effetre's brand new Butternut color is so aptly named - it actually looks like real butternut squash to me!

As much as I really love fall colors, this one falls just a bit short for me, for several reasons, but I am going to start with the good points first.

Butternut does act just like a coral in the flame - meaning it has a nice consistency and a dense color. It works well, and is neither stiff nor soupy.

This color does encase very well - in fact, that's probably the only way I personally would use it. It does not bleed a lot and keeps its bright color through a thick layer of clear.

Its main negative point is that the glass does not stay bright yellow-orange, as I would like. The color tends to fade in and out and striate a kind of greyish green in some spots. This means it might be nice for organics, but for the kind of beads I make, it probably won't work. The golden yellow orange shade is lovely, but the grey streaks are a turn off.

I think I would be better off using one of Effetre's other regular yellow shades, like Dark Yellow or Red Roof Tile.

Glass Testing: Effetre Rosewood

This pretty color, which has no number that I can find, is a new one from Effetre which unfortunately has only been available at Frantz in their auctions. I am really hoping that this glass will be listed by rod there soon!




Rosewood is a lovely shade of burnt sienna/brick/terracotta that striates and stays nice and saturated.


It reminds me of a painted desert, and I think would make lovely spacers and a gorgeous base for organics.






I like the density of Rosewood - and its tendency to keep its bright color even when encased. It does spread, but only slightly, and was not difficult to layer.

I would LOVE to see Kimberly Affleck use this as a base for a seahorse! I think the woodsy, painted feel of this color lends itself very well to an organic look - but might even be nice with encased geometrics and florals.

I'll be keeping my eye out for this glass!

Glass Testing: Effetre 281 Marmorin Light

Continuing on with some glass testing today, I have three colors I am going to review. The first is Effetre's new semi-opaque called Marmorin Light (available at Frantz Art Glass in their Beyond Beauty Assortment).

This color is weird, but I can totally see how great this might be if used in making organic designs. It looks sort of moonstone-y in the rod, and when pilled into the petal for the swatch, it stayed that way.

In the flame, this glass goes a translucent dark grey that can kind of be hard to see when you're applying it to another dark glass, like black.

This seems to be a striking glass, going opaque gray in spots as you work it. You can get a stringer gray color by striking it over and over, allowing the color to cool and reintroducing it to the flame very slowly.

Marmorin light does tend to bleed a little bit, and does separate and striate a little as well. The effect can be seen in the encased spacer, here with Diamond Clear. You can also see it striate over black, which I think is a lovely effect.

The biggest surprise with this color was the tendency to turn an olive-ish grey in the kiln when used as a solid base. It certainly was nowhere near that color when I put it in there!

All in all, I think this color is interesting, but probably not a color I would use for my usual geometric and floral beads because if its reactive properties. I think it would make lovely olive-y spacers and a cool base for organics, though!