CiM Color Testing: A few colors!

So I've been asked to test 104 coe soft glass colors for the new-ish company Creation is Messy - and I've been doing that behind the scenes and unofficially for awhile now. My heart sang when I got to do some official testing for them - I love to see new colors and find out what makes them tick! This post is the first installment of a series devoted to CiM colors.

In this first post, I will give some impressions of brand new and semi-new colors, and include pics of some of my recent sets made with CiM as well as other brands. Keep in mind that these impressions are really limited - some of these colors I have only used a couple of times. I will post more in depth when I have more experience with them.

First off, I will start with some notes about the Pink Champagne (see my earlier post about it).

Kathy of CiM asked me this: "Did you feel like the batch of Pink Champagne that you bought at the Gathering was significantly different than the one I sent you samples of? The hue was slightly different in rod form but I felt like it worked out to be pretty close to the same. I’ve been working on tightening up our hue benchmarking / quality control system so checking in to see if I am succeeding or not . . ."

Here are my thoughts:

The rods I bought at the Gathering are pretty close to the ones she sent. I am getting consistent color with all the rods, so I don't think there's a problem there. I do think that glass in particular, as well as the other glasses that have amounts of lavender in them, does have a very strong reaction to lighting environments. I think that may be what's messing everyone up. :) I see this happen with colors in the Effetre line as well - 082, 081 and 080 specifically have varying amounts of lavender, and therefore react to light. They can all range from very vivid lavender to washed out pale blue to soft, warm pink and all variations in between. That's just the nature of whatever metals they use in lavender glass. It happens with the Bullseye neo-lavenders as well. I may do a blog post on the variations of lavender across the 104 lines. When I get a free moment - lol!

More colors:

Here are the pics and the impressions - I work on a minor burner with natural gas and an oxy concentrator. I work relatively small and cool.

This is the set with Pink Champagne over Effetre 256 Odd Raspberry (this glass is impossible to find - you can use regular 256 which is slightly lighter), paired with Vetrofond Yellow Ocher and Vetrofond Crystal Clear. Pink Champagne is a nicely stiff glass, although not quite as stiff as some others in the CiM line. It didn't scum at all - any bubbles that did appear burned off really quickly. The glass has a wonderful consistency - and worked well with the Effetre.


I love the color shifting properties - it gives this color an ethereal quality. CiM Pink Champagne makes unbelievably gorgeous spacers and works really, really well as a base. There are no reactions as far as I can see with other glass - it doesn't bleed, suck up other colors or have any metallic reactions that I saw. It's just a clean, balanced transparent medium shade that shifts in different lighting environments.

This is the CiM Pumpkin with Vetrofond Crystal Clear, paired with Effetre 256 Odd Raspberry, Vetrofond Rubino and Effetre 081 Dark Lavender.


Pumpkin is also a straightforward glass in my view, relatively soft in consistency, and has very few reactions from what I could see. It paired nicely with the other colors. It basically has similar properties to most other 104 "special" orange/red/yellow colors - turns dark orange in the flame, likes a cooler environment and has slight color striations on occasion.


Slight darker lines appeared when I melted the encased Rubino stringer on some of the Pumpkin bases - but I think that was due to the dark wine of the Rubino on top of the orange, rather than any reaction. I love this color - it's a deep yellow orange that's very vivid and strong, and doesn't seem to burn out at all.


This set is Dirty Martini with Leaky Pen and bits of Vetrofond Crystal Clear- and it's etched. Hubba hubba. Let me tell you - this Dirty Martini made my heart skip a beat. It's. So. Pretty. Leaky Pen and Dirty Martini were made for eachother....they make amazing love. Yey! Okay - on to the real information.


I fully expected Dirty Martini to have some type of metallic reaction like most other 104 line shades of pale blue/turquoise/green. But it didn't really - and I LOVE that. The grey-ish quality of the rods brighten up just a bit when they're melted - and the result is a pearly minty grey/green/blue shade that made my heart sing.


The glass is soft and easy to work, didn't devit like I expected, and etched so well that I almost died. The color does striate a little - especially when you melt in color on top of it. Little pale lines will form around the Leaky Pen encased stringer. It's a balanced color - no bleeding/sucking (lol). It is absolutely the perfect complement to the dark vividness of the Leaky Pen.











The Dirty Martini/Leaky Pen combo is tested even further by adding it to Heffalump and Simply Berry Unique with a splash of Vetrofond Crystal Clear. Heffalump and Simply Berry are another match made in heaven!

The nice thing about Heffalump is that it doesn't burn out like the Effetre 221 Pale Lavender tends to - it's a bit darker and more dense. It's a wonderful pale complement to the depth of the Simply Berry shades. Simply Berry needed this cool lavender - because putting Simply Berry over any other purple just wasn't doing it for me.

Simply Berry Unique (the light version) just pops, and Heffalump is just the right pale color to give it that extra ooomph. Heffalump color striates slightly like the Dirty Martini, and is the same consistency. Heffalump flirts with devit, but is really easy to burn off. There is a tendency for it to turn translucent when melted into a transparent color - you can see this in the dot bead third from the right in the pic. But it's not too bad.

Of course Simply Berry Unique is one of my very favorite transparent purples - it's heaven in a glass rod. I've reviewed it for CiM once before, and my impressions of it are still the same.

I'm really impressed so far with the quality of the CiM glass I have tested. I'm one who loves glass that doesn't react, devit, scum, bleed or suck up other colors - the CiM glass colors I have used are wonderful for making crisp, clean geometric and floral beads. More to come!