CiM Glass Testing: 411 Sprout Ltd. Run

Man, time flies when you've got zillions of new glass colors to test!

Originally, I had planned on testing and reporting on a gorgeous new CiM color called Cardamom several months ago. I obtained some of this pretty green at last year's Gathering, along with a bunch of other colors that still haven't made it to my torch.  However, when I tried to work with Cardamom, I found that it was so incredibly stiff that I just couldn't make it work with the kind of beads that I make.  Smaller work with a lot of layering and encasing really does need glass that moves.  At least in my experience.

Soooo, I traded my precious pound of Cardamom to Kimberly, for some DH clear and moved on.  I was sad - Cardamom really is such a pretty light green that would be great for springtime beads.

Happily, a couple of months ago, I got another test batch from CiM, and included with it was a rod of pale green that seemed to be pretty close to Cardamom! 

This dense, opaque color is called Sprout, and is almost ghostly in appearance, without the grey tones of Dirty Martini or the yellow tones of Key Lime Pie.  It's slightly lighter in shade than Cardamom.....and much less stiff!  I would call this color a true mint green.

For my purposes, Sprout makes a lovely base color and is nice for layering with transparent greens.  The only drawback I can see is that encasing it with clear (as you can see in the spacer picture) causes it to fade to almost white.  Therefore, I recommend encasing with pale greens - such as Effetre Pale Emerald or CiM Appletini.



In the sets below, I used Effetre Light Emerald for layering, and the result was a pretty, sparkly light green that reminds me of the tropics. There wasn't any striation or any bleeding/feathering. The color stayed put where I wanted it for all layering.

As you can see, using Sprout as a base for the encased floral yielded a very pale color that doesn't come through as much as I would like, because clear was used for the encasing, and the green washed out.

Beyond that, though, Sprout is a lovely color perfect for spring and summer beadmaking!