Raspberry Flip

Every once in a while I'll make something that turns out exactly how I wanted it to. Then I despair of ever being able to do it again. These beads were the perfect example of this. I made a rectangular tabular bead with CiM cranberry and CiM desert pink with a swirl of sis and liked it so much, I had to make a bracelet of it. The result is my raspberry flip bracelet just listed on Zibbet. To take a look at my shop, click http://www.zibbet.com/FireinIce/artwork?artworkId=78030 Then I had to do my perfect bead again and again. The same size.

The depth of the flat sides was easy because I just had to adjust the space on my press and I've found that the length doesn't change much, so all I had to figure out was how much glass to put on the mandrel to make the width I wanted. Once this was accomplished, it was just a matter of doing it again.

Now there is the matter of photography. I am a minimalist when it comes to equipment (I have a camera) so I decided to take advantage of the fading natural sunlight to photograph the transparent red glass to it's best effect. Apparently the light was fading a little faster than I thought, because the last picture had to be taken with the lamp and table arrangement. There is a lot of similarity in the first picture, which was taken when the light was still good, and the third. My setup can't be too bad, for this color at least.

I love this bracelet. I listed it on Zibbet because I've reached the conclusion that I realistically can't keep everything I make, but this was not a decision I made easily.

CiM chai unique

Now this color I'm much happier about.  Chai:  a tea based beverage infused with spices and full of sweet milky goodness.  The color isn't like any tea I've ever brewed, and I've brewed a few batches of chai, but the color is nice.  This unique is a pink reminiscent of CiM desert pink, which is bead 11, but I precede myself.
1 is plain, unencased.
2 is encased with effetre super clear.
3 is with silver foil melted in.  I can't quite show the texture in this picture.  The color is very nice indeed, but the texture reminds me of something nasty.
4 is with silver foil, melted in and encased with super clear.  Interestingly enough, the silver reaction was subdued as I encased it.  This was actually visible as I encased the bead.  I've never had this happen before.   It was as if the encasement sank the silver into the depths of the bead.
5 is with triton, melted in and reduced.  Something brown happened to the pink, and while it is more true to the color of chai, the beverage, I'm not sure I like it in this color.
6 is with aurae (OK, I ran out of triton stringer or I would have used that) melted in, reduced and encased in super clear.  There is a distinct muddiness which I can't say I care for.
7 is with ivory.  Seashell beads, anyone?  No reaction and neat color combo.
8 is with copper green red.  One bad thing about photo software is that it can't do everything for you.  This bead has tones of green and blue that are not visible in my picture and any efforts to emphasize these characteristics made the rest of the pictures nasty.  Trust me, it looks better in real life than it does here.
9 is with turquoise.  I never noticed how much the turquoise spreads before.  I wish it didn't, since this color combo looks nice in real life.
10 is with CiM hades.  I know this spreads.  If I were to want to make a bead with this combo, which is very attractive, I would have to pay very careful attention to this characteristic. 
11, again, is CiM desert pink, which is ever so close to this color.  In fact, let me post the whole review.

I won't bore by reposting what I already did, but there is a lot of similarity.  There is a little separation on the hades bead which I didn't catch before, though.

My overall impression is that I would buy this color again, if it were available.  It is a nice shade of tawny pink.  It works for me.

shoulda stayed in bed

 I decided to do something for Valentines day so I made a big pink bead.  It measures about an inch in diameter by about an inch and a half in length.  It has pink rose cane marks on it.  It has green blobs that were meant to be leaves.    It didn't crack.  This is about all I can say about it.  One of my coworkers said she liked it for the color, CiM desert pink.  The others hated it, because it rots.  I have fairly good stringer placement, if not control, and that is all I can say good about this.  More experimenting is in order on the rose cane.  I think it will work for blended stringer, but it doesn't much look like a rose.  It's kind of like those flower pictures your kids give you.  Oh...how pretty...is that a flower.....

Let it be known that if you forget to turn off your crockpot at night and then go to work at 5:00 in the morning, leaving it on because you thought it was off, come home to an intact place of dwelling, and smell it burning after you have your stuff done for the night you should count yourself lucky.  I am.  The dark marks on the side are soot marks from where it didn't quite catch fire.  What else can I say about today?  I should have stayed in bed.

so many colors, so little time

 Being fairly compulsive in nature, I decided after the first couple of days of posting that I would only post once per day.  Rules are meant to be broken, and on a day when I get more glass this one is.  I will be so busy making beads and forming impressions that I have to get them down or burst.  To the left is a color that I was only moderately interested in in the paddle form but one that I will definitely be using lots more of in different forms and with different colors, CiM desert pink.  This reminds me a lot of Vetrofond seashell swirl and acts a lot alike as well.  Plain bead on the left cracked a couple of times on the mandrel as I wasn't heating it enough and I would remember it and go back to it and fix it.  It doesn't appear to strike and unstrike if the color changes in this process are any indication.  Encased bead next doesn't change a lot in intensity under clear, which was a bit of a surprise.  I deliberately left the encasement partial so I could check this.  Next up is the bead rolled in silver foil and melted in.  Some folks might find the color change off-putting, but I think the tortoiseshell thing appealing.  Having seen this I went on to make the fourth bead on the mandrel, the foiled and encased.  This was a little disappointing, because I got exactly what I put into it, a tortoiseshell looking bead encased (badly) in clear.  Who knew?  The next one is the one that got me excited.  On the left is DH triton and on the right is DH aurae.  Both were melted in, reduced and half encased in clear, so I can see the plain and encased versions in one bead.  Yeah, it's a cheat, so sue me.  Both the triton and aurae look good on the desert pink, with the golden brown fuming I was expecting.  What surprised me was that encased, there was no fuming and both colors looked pretty good.  The black and pink bead was made using desert pink and CiM hades, using fairly equal amounts of each.  Ordinarily I would say that hades is pushing in, because it certainly seems to be taking over the bead, but when comparing it with the similar bead made with Vetrofond dark ivory, I see that the pink is a bit of a shrinking violet - drumroll please.  Really, the pink just sort of disappeared.  On the ivory bead, only patches of altered color show where the desert pink dots used to be.  I like this color combination, since not many pinks play nice with ivory.  I want to test copper green (with or without red, or both) and dark silver plum, since I think this pink might have a silver base and I think they might work well together, but I ran out of time tonight.  Tomorrow is another day.

This one is the much anticipated TE-362.  It was not listed on the Double Helix website, so I didn't know what to expect other than the blurb and picture on the Frantz Art Glass site, which is the same as I would get from DH, but moving on from that I can seldom get the same effects out of my HH torch.  I was again pleasantly surprised by how well this worked for me.  Not as dramatic as what was pictured, but I wasn't expecting it to be.  There are all kinds of subtle color variations on the plain, reduced bead, and encased (and cracked - I was looking again) the color shifts slightly more blue and creamy.  Over CiM hades It looks a little lavender pink, and on its own as a very fine stringer on hades, this is more pronounced.  Quite a lot out of an unassuming tan rod.  Incidentally, there is something a little strange about these rods.  The surface is rough and the raised bumps are little beads of silver visible in the glass.  Cool.  You can almost see them in this picture.  Now I have to pull a whole lot of stringer so I can see what this glass does on other colors.