Monday, December 3, 2018

Glass Testing: CiM 630 Your Majesty, 628 Wisteria and 488 Peppermint Cream

Okay, everyone - I know it's been like 7 billion years since I have last posted a glass test, but here I am! Creation is Messy sent out a really large batch of new colors this time, too.

First off, not all the colors in the package are completely new; CiM has remade or reformulated a bunch of colors, and created two new sub-sections of glass they are calling Misty Opals and Sparkles. Misty Opals are a bit like the old Moonstone shades, in that they are somewhat more translucent than regular Opals. The Sparkles are transparent colors mixed with goldstone. I'll get to those in a later post.

Now, I personally do not have a ton of experience with opals in general, so my testing of these (and there are a lot of them) will be somewhat limited to my own skill-set and style. I may not test every one - mostly because there are, like, 8 different shades of green opal, and I imagine they are all pretty similar. But I will try to get to as many was I can.

Almost all of the colors sent with this batch are Limited Runs, so assume the colors are not part of their main color line unless otherwise indicated. This is because CiM is not certain they can remake a lot of their new colors, and when they try to remake a color that doesn't have an established recipe and production, it's often just different enough to warrant its own name and number.

For this first session, I tested three colors - one opaque, one transparent and one of the Misty Opals.

The opaque is an off-white shade with just the teeniest hint of a greenish cast, and it's called Peppermint Cream. One major thing to begin with is that the rods of this color I was given were extremely shocky. Now, I am not sure if this is just a problem with these first rods, or if they have a whole batch like that. But I ended up wasting a lot of what I had just trying to get a flame environment right enough to melt a few gathers and pull stringers. I ended up having to heat the ends of the rods in the kiln for a bit before melting. The shockiness returned after the rod cooled, so I had to do this several times. This frustrates me to no end! These days, pale opaque rods are more often than not really shocky. Hopefully they can fix this, because if it can't be fixed, I won't be buying this color, even though it is very pretty. I have let Kathy of CiM know about this and hope for a response soon.

Beyond the shockiness, Peppermint Cream is a nice, opaque neutral color that I mostly just used as a base. I wasn't able to encase it for stringer because the rod kept shattering, but I was able to make some spacers and a couple of beads with it. Once it is hot, it has a nice consistency and stays opaque. I did notice some specks of what might be dirt or something in the petal I pulled, which may account for the shocky nature. You can see this if you look closely at the picture above.

I don't have much else to say about Peppermint Cream - but if they end up reformulating it to remove the fragility, I will gladly test it again. I'd like to have this shade in my arsenal - it's nice to have a cooler off-white color as a base.

Next, we have Your Majesty, a medium transparent plum/purple. It seems to be a lighter version of Simply Berry, CiM's dark amethyst shade. I would say that even though Your Majesty has less of a brownish cast than its Effetre cousins, it is still much more plum than purple. I do like that it's not too dark - this will make it a nice color to layer with light purple and blue opaques.

In the beads below, I layered it on top of Evil Queen, and it worked nicely. I can't say this is the most exciting purple in the world, but it's better than some of the alternatives. I would love it if CiM could recreate the Simply Berry Unique one-off that was similar to this, but much less plum and more orchid in color.

Your Majesty was a tiny bit stiffer than usual, but not enough to keep it from layering well. It didn't have any reactive properties, and didn't spread, bleed or scum. It's got great clarity as well. 

Last, we have Wisteria, a Misty Opaque that is a remake of Crocus that is supposed to have more translucency after annealing. I would say it does succeed in that regard, lending an almost pinkish cast to the glowy lavender shade that is Crocus, because more light is getting though.

This glass was not too stiff, and melted nicely. I was able to use it as encased stringer - I layered it on top of Rapunzel (CiM's opaque pale lavender) and pulled a stringer that worked well for scrolling. It held up well when used that way - which is a nice change from the usually persnickety opals, which tended to pop off and crack when used as encased stringer for scrollwork.

In the beads below, I used it as my transparent when layering, and Rapunzel as the opaque. As you can see, these lighter purples faded into the background behind the darker plum. It's just visible enough to lighten the plum dots and ads a little dimension. I think Misty Opals would probably be better used as a base, or as raised decoration, rather than as layered dots.

Wisteria, like almost every other lavender glass on the planet, is a color shifter; it goes bluer under fluorescent lighting, and fades out under some of the new energy efficient bulbs. Under my Reveal bulbs, it stays true glowy lavender with a pinkish cast.

Again, I don't tend to work with opals, so I don't have a lot more to say, except it is very pretty!  Here are a couple of beads with all three colors (along with Evil Queen and clear).

I have not included links to colors in this post because they are not up on CiM's website yet. When they go up, I will edit them in. More colors to come soon!






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