Green and Periwinkle

 On Friday I posted an unforseen reaction I found when trying out one of my favorite color combinations.  I had hoped that the problem was with CiM peacock green, which I love but can work around.  Apparently, it is with the combination of this blue green and Effetre periwinkle.

 This was the first bead, made on a base of peacock green with cracks surrounding the periwinkle lines.

 Since peacock green is relatively demanding with regards to annealing, I hoped that switching the glass and being careful with the annealing would yield better results.  The result on Effetre nile green opalino belies this.  I was extra slow annealing in my Chilli Pepper just to be on the safe side.  There are still cracks all around the Effetre dark periwinkle  scrolls.  If I didn't melt the periwinkle in, nothing bad happened, but apparently there is some stress from the glass itself so I don't expect the bumpy one I did will hold up long.  I've used this periwinkle on other beads with other bases so it's just the blue greens that are a problem.

I made a small, spacer sized, bead with peacock green and CiM grumpy bear melted in to see if it would react the same way.  I am thrilled to say it did not.  Note the separation in the middle of the periwinkle lines is opposite what's happening with the Effetre periwinkle.  It looks like the bead might be cracked, but what is happening is light reflecting on the bottom of the sunken in scrolls.

I think for kicks I'm going to do a bead of grumpy bear with Effetre dark periwinkle decoration and see what happens.  This is driving me nuts.

Effetre nile green opalino

Effetre nile green opalino wasn't available for a while, and having worked the others, I was anxious to give this a whirl. It is a nice, spring green that I think works best by itself. It remains stiff when worked, more toward the transparents than the opaques. I found myself constantly resisting the urge to work lower in the flame or turn up the gas, since this color is ridiculously sensitive to torch chemistry and if the flame is too reducing, the beads will go an ugly, greyish olive with "smoke" spots on them. If they had beed surface flaws, I might have tried etching to remove the discoloration, but the glass was stained all the way through so I threw out a couple beads where I wasn't able to resist temptation.

Plain, these are a nice, jade green that becomes more ethereal when encased in clear. Note the lack of a clear dividing line where one glass starts and the other stops. Following Pat Frantz's advice, all the encased beads were made on a core of clear to prevent cracking, which the opalino colors are supposed to be prone to do when encased.

Application of metal is a way to shift the hue of this green toward yellow or blue. Adding either does affect the surface, which must be taken into account, but the silver definitely shifts the glass strongly toward the yellow end and copper sends it equally decisively toward the blue. Both have tiny bubbles on them, with the copper being more noticeable.

Double Helix aurae doesn't do well on this glass and I doubt I will do this again. It is interesting the way the unencased bead has separation of the aurae.

I wanted to compare the effects of ivory and CiM butter pecan on a real bead and found they were similar. Both separated a bit, with the ivory on the left separating more strongly, and both are about the same shade. I thought the green glass would react with the ivory to produce a grey line, which it didn't, so I will have to compare them again on a color which I know does.

CiM tuxedo reflects quite a bit into the opalio, and the opalino dots on top of it are invisible. I ran out of gas just as I made the middle bead with intense black, but I believe the tiny opalino dots on top of the intense black ones would have been a waste of time. I was pleased that Gelly's sty didn't do anything weird with the opalino, since I may do something in a muted floral with these two.


I would probably buy this glass again. It is a color that does not really appear in the other manufacturer's lines and will make nice beads as long as I don't forget what it can and can't do.