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!

***Edited again: I have retested this color with wonderful results! Click here to see.

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!