Effetre Neptune

Neptune is one of the new colors from Effetre that looked very promising in the catalog. My beads are no where near as nice as the ones pictured by others, but I really like this color.

In the rod it reminds me very strongly of CiM mermaid, in fact labeling would be an issue if the rods weren't so irregular. Obviously a hand pulled color. One of them is almost 10mm and all are a little lumpy. This I don't mind. It is supposed to develop a silver metallic lustre, except under clear. Clear removes this lustre, even if it is well developed when the clear is applied. I tried to do a plain bead without lustre and one with, by working it high in the flame as I would plum silver. The one on the left is wound and that's it, and I allowed the one on the right to cool a little and reheated it gently. I think there is a little change but not as much as I could have hoped.

Under clear, the change is striking. The bicone is just Neptune and clear, the oval is with Effetre whisper because I wanted to see if it would do anything weird under a gold pink and wanted to be able to see it if it did. The cylindrical bead is rolled in silver foil, melted in and trailed with clear. I don't see a whole lot of difference between the beads at all.

Does Neptune play nice with others? Pretty much. Intense black bled, and I put dots of clear on the top of the top dots of Neptune so I could see what was happening underneath. EDP looks nice but the Neptune dots get kind of lost over the EDP and under the clear. I didn't dot the Neptune over the ivory because I knew there would be that grey line and wanted to see what happened to the ivory with all that green around. It held its own.

Copper leaf accentuates the lustre process, and gives a lustre-like effect under clear. Good to know, but I didn't do a very good job of encasing, did I?

I made a couple wee beads just for fun and am happy about the way the one on the left, with triton and clear turned out. I'm not so happy how the one with plum silver and clear turned out, but what did I expect. I did learn that plum silver dark is indistinguishable from the Neptune once it is struck. I don't know what I was trying to do with the tiny dots of clear, but it didn't work, whatever it was.



Will I buy this color again? Yep, and I will play lots more with the lustre glasses from Double Helix.

CiM mermaid

These beads were made a week or so ago using CiM mermaid.  I like the beads and I like the color.  What I do not like is the amount of aggravation it took to get them up there, and now the post isn't autosaving.  This does not bode well.  Why does every computer programmer never quit while something is working well?  It has to be tweaked again and again until everything crashes.

Enough of a rant.  I have been suffering from a nasty cold/flu and have not been up to torching, so nothing new to me for the time being, and me with new glass, too, so here are some of the ones I have lying around.

CiM mermaid doesn't do much interacting that I can see, except with copper leaf, ivory, and EDP.  With copper leaf it goes black and crusted on its own and blue under encasement.  I like this effect.  I like the effect I got with the triton unencased.  The oddball silver glass bead is with aurae.  With ivory that grey line comes back.  Not a surprise.  With EDP, the purple pops and the mermaid separates.  Neat.  I like the purple and green combination of the mermaid and copper red green, and wouldn't you know the mermaid and intense black bead chipped just where it was going to be pointing up.

Will I buy this color again?  Probably.  It fills a niche not found in any other coe 104 glass that I know of.