CiM butter pecan

A while back I reviewed CiM ginger and made a comparison bead with butter pecan, which was pretty identical with the rods I chose. There is quite a bit of variability in both these colors, and the rod color has a lot to do with the color the finished beads turn out. Butter pecan is a good pink to choose for human sculptural forms (think caucasian goddesses and angels) with the warning that it does get pretty drippy. Not quite as soft as ivory but close, and it stays hot for a long time. In the packet of glass I received, there was a lot of variation in rod size, the one I chose to do tests being about 4mm and the largest 7mm.

Plain butter pecan is creamy with an ever so slight streakiness that disappears if the bead is worked at all. With silver foil there is some yellow fuming, but not as much of a surface reaction as I was expecting. I don't really care for the pearly effect reducing the silver and encasing it has here.

What I do dig is the combination of copper leaf and butter pecan. I will be making some sort of beads with this. The iridescent blue of reduced triton looks nice against the neutral background, but I don't really care for the dark chrome of triton without the dots of clear.

Butter pecan is supposed to be a less reactive alternative to ivory and I wanted to do a test bead to see how close they were. I don't think they are very close, but particularly with a test I did on nile green opalino, the test bead may not indicate what really happens when other colors are involved.

I tested butter pecan with tuxedo in the middle and intense black on the right to see which, if either, would web and what would happen. Tuxedo and butter pecan are about the same degree of softness when melted, so each pretty much kept to itself. Intense black stayed crisp on the butter pecan, but webbed the dots of butter pecan on top like crazy.

Plum silver does pretty well on butter pecan, developing a nice lustre and not having too bad an edge reaction. Copper green does form a slight grey line, but not as bad as on some other colors. EDP bleeds like crazy when placed on top of butter pecan, and the way the butter pecan forms a clear dot in the middle is wild.

I'm glad I have this color in my palette and will be buying more when I run out. I am thinking of some seaside themed beads and I think this color will be one of the main ones I will be using.

CiM ginger

A new batch of colors came in today, and it's time to go frantic torching.  One I was particularly waiting for was CiM ginger.  It looks pretty close to their butter pecan, and does some strange things.

By itself as the first bead on the mandrel, it comes out pretty much the same color as the rod, maybe a shade lighter.  The next bead was struck with very thin dots of striking red to see if it was a striker.  Nothing here that I could see.  With silver it goes brown, and this lessens under encasement, with no visible effect from reduction.  In this case, I definitely like the DH triton on the other encased bead better reduced.  The pale green and peach is nice.  Aurae went really nasty and baby poop colored.  With copper green, there is the faintest of grey lines, but much less than ivory, which this is supposed to replace, but does not much resemble.  The next bead, which looks a lot like a self one, is actually in combination with CiM butter pecan.  A little explanation is in order.

These are the rods, in the packages.  The lighting in my "studio" is horrible, so I had to adjust the heck out of the light and color levels, but this was pretty close to the way they actually looked in the glass stash, with the original labels.  The butter pecan is pretty consistent, but the ginger shows a lot of variation in the rods.  I wonder if the beads will turn out different.  Usually CiM is much more consistent than this.

Back to the beads.  The next bead is looking very textural with silvered ivory stringer really melted in.  I like this effect.  What surprised me was that there was a slight reaction with ivory, with the ginger going dark where it contacted the ivory.  Curiouser and curiouser.  Ginger separated on intense black, no surprise, but also on EDP, which was.

Further testing is in order.