Win a Tutorial!

Lori Greenberg is having a contest over on her blog to win one of my tutorials! She interviewed me last week on Beadnerd and decided to review the Raised Flower tutorial and have a giveaway. Take a look at her blog over on Beadnerd - it's a wonderful business blog for artists. Her personal beadmaking blog is great too! Thanks Lori!

Glass Testing: CiM 773 Tamarind

This is another color I am blissfully happy with - yey CiM!
Tamarind is an opaque caramel color with a slight tendency to strike at first. However, this color evens out and gets dense as it's worked, especially when other colors are layered on top of it.
The color is so much like candy!

Tamarind is slightly stiff, but very smooth when melted. It encases very well with no bleeding, and stays a true caramel color with very little striation. Tamarind is one of the most stable opaque browns I have ever seen - making it perfect for layering and decorating in geometric patterns and florals.

Paired with CiM Maple it is the perfect brown. Layer it with any of the Effetre Ambers it makes lovely dense fall colors.

This is one opaque color that I would use alone, as a base, as it is saturated enough to pop as an autumn shade.

Makes absolutely wonderful spacers.

In the set shown here, the focal has a Tamarind base and is decorated with melted scrolling that is a Tamarind stringer encased with CiM Maple. The flowers are DH Aurae. Reducing the Aurae for the metallic look didn't cause a lot of reaction in the Tamarind, which is nice.















The set below is a variety of beads which contain a lot of Tamarind both as a base and as a layering color with other opaques and transparents.

Glass Testing: CiM 780 Maple

This color is fantastic. I am so happy with it that I plan to buy a bunch as soon as I have the cash.

CiM Maple is a very stable medium transparent brown which is the perfect light coffee color. What's particularly lovely about Maple to me is that it does not strike and does not react - it stays that true medium brown. It's not so dark that you can't make spacers with it, but not too light that it won't show up when encased.

Maple's consistency is slightly stiff, like most of CiM's transparents, but not too stiff. The glass does darken a lot in the flame, but lightens and evens out while cooling.

Using this color to layer over other opaques is wonderful - it doesn't get so dark that you can't see what's underneath.

This was always the color I went for when trying to hand-mix my own brown - and could never quite get.

Shown here are some beads I made (which are on ebay) with Maple as one of the main transparents. Also a plain spacer is shown.

Pair this with Effetre Mud Slide or CiM Tamarind and you have heaven. Bravo CiM!!

Glass Testing: Effetre 209 Sea Green

I'm not fond of this color - the name or the color itself. Sea Green the glass is much darker and more primary than the name suggests.

Sea Green striates and separates like most other Effetre opaque greens, which makes it a color that I will likely not work with.

It also bleeds when encased, and takes over other colors, making it likely a lot more palatable to beadmakers who make organic beads or like reactive, unpredictable glass.

That being said, when it is encased, minus the obvious bleeding, the color does lighten and is prettier that way to my eye. It does retain striations when encased, though, making it possibly a good glass for making vine stringer.

I would not use this color for the geometric designs or florals that I tend to stick to. Again, this color is only available currently through Frantz in their Beyond Beauty assortment.

Shown here are a solid basic round and two attempts at encasing a solid base.

Glass Testing: Effetre 420-MS Coral Martian Strata

Yet another Coral batch in a long line of variations on a theme.....as a beadmaker, I am over all the Coral batches.

They are all starting to look the same - I think Effetre can safely move on, as long as they release a color that is actually Coral.

This batch is pretty, though - a very dark variation with striations of tomato red mixed with a slightly pinkish hue that fades in and out. Martian Strata does separate even more than most of the other corals I have worked with, hence the name I imagine.

As for the way the glass behaves, it is very similar to other darker corals in that it doesn't bleed when encased, and evens out slightly under a thick clear layer.
It stays relatively dark under a clear encasement, and makes a nice layering glass.

This is another color that is only offered in the Beyond Beauty assortment at Frantz until they get the color up individually. I would be so much more interested if there were not forty zillion other coral batches already in the Effetre line. LOL

Shown here is a basic sold round bead as well as a bead layered with clear and Martian Strata dots to show the stability.

Glass Testing: Effetre 703 Mud Slide

When I first melted this color, it behaved much like Effetre Powder Pink (without the terracotta orange color) in that it grays out in the flame and has a blotchy striking pattern which is difficult to control. Mud Slide strikes to a color that is a lot like the drink it might be named after - a dense light brown bordering on a pale clay. Once it strikes evenly, it makes a wonderful opaque base for darker transparent browns such as CiM's new Maple (post about that one here).

Mud Slide is relatively non-reactive as far as I can tell - it works well with other glasses and does not bleed when encased. The color evens out under a layer of clear encasing, lightening to a true tan shade.

Pictured beads include a solid lentil, an encased spacer, a solid basic round, and a round with a base of Mud Slide, decorated with a scroll in encased purple stringer.

Like Powder Pink, Mud Slide tends to even out when worked longer and when layered with other glass. It only separates and gets blotchy when used as a solid base and not pressed or worked. It's a lovely opaque shade that would make a nice base for many transparents.

So far, the only place I have seen where Mud Slide can be purchased is at Frantz as part of their Beyond Beauty rod assortment. Hopefully they will add the individual colors of that assortment soon!

This set was made with Mudslide and a variety of other colors including CiM Maple, Tamarind, Effetre Topaz, Dark Red Brown and Diamond Clear. Mudslide was the lightest opaque used, and was mostly used in layering to achieve the lighter fall colors.

Glass Color Testing!

A couple of weeks ago, before the heat wave of doom, I was asked by Mike over at Frantz Art Glass to help out with some glass testing on some new colors he had in. I said yes of course! So I will be posting a lot more on glass colors in the coming weeks - for both Frantz's glass colors in Effetre and whatever else he gives me, and also for CiM (Creation is Messy). I've been slacking off in the testing department for CiM, so it's about time I get back to it.

Anyway, I am going to do one post per color, and will begin tonight with the 5 colors I have finished testing. Stay tuned!