Vetrofond ELO Revisited

I previously posted here about the difference I experienced with a new batch of Vetrofond Extra Light Olive and how it wasn't acting the same as the previous batch did.  It turns out there is a very good reason for that.  They aren't the same color.  The labels on the bundles say this, I just hadn't read them properly.

The egg on the right is made with the original ELO.  Nice pale olive.  The top bead is made with ELO PALE.  Ah hah!  That would explain it.  Apparently the thing that makes it pale does something in my torch chemistry to turn the glass pink and reducing it, which I did deliberately here, gives it a bronzed look.  Now I can use these two properly!

Vetrofond Extra Light Olive?

I may have missed something here.  The label on the rods says they're Vetrofond extra light olive and, in fact, the unworked rods ARE extra light olive.  When I work them they go pinkish beige with a heavy coppery reduction that reminds me of Picasso finish on Czech glass.  My old batch didn't do this but I'm at a loss as to why.  I do like the color but it wasn't what I was expecting.

It does work great for bunnies!

Psychedelic Ribbons

I just listed 3 more beads on Zibbet http://www.zibbet.com/FireinIce. Not a nibble yet, but today is the third day I'm on it and I've been listing at a pace which (for me) is pretty fast. At least one of them has been pictured here before, but I was waiting to list them because I wanted to have them available for Heritage Days on June 5-6. Zibbet doesn't have that rule about selling outside their platform, so I'll cancel them if I sell them at the show. They were inspired by Pat Frantz' blog about using DH Psyche with ivory, or in this case, opal yellow and Vetro ELO. I love the way the Psyche struck in them. I had been having a lot of trouble getting neat color effects from it and these were just what I was looking for. They turned out so well, in fact, I don't want to let them go.

All three are a twistie of opal yellow and Psyche over a base of Vetro ELO, heated as hot as I could on my HotHead, then allowed to air cool until no longer glowing at all, then turning up the gas and just giving them a twist or two on the flame, very low in the cone, almost on top of the burner. The iridescent purples, blues, and greens knock me out. I was working on producing long beads for some beadable accessories, so I learned a lot making them in addition to how to strike Psyche. My shaping skills still have room for improvement, but these were definitely a start. I was having a heck of a time making beads to a specific length. I have access to a caliper now when Joe lets me borrow it (must buy my own) but it took a while to figure out to make a marker bead on each end the length I wanted the finished bead to be and then filling it in.

The final lesson I learned was in trying to publish this blog this evening. I do not like the new blogger in draft format at all and absolutely loathe the contortions I have to go through to get pictures into my blog. I invariably wind up scratching the whole thing and doing it again from the blog itself. If wordpress wasn't even that much harder to use and access, I'd be doing that instead. Does anyone know any other stand-alone blog formats?

longer beads

 I've been working on some longer beads to go in the party tools I picked up.  It's quite a challenge keeping these things hot.  I am positively terrified of going to rewarm them and blowing them up.  Don't laugh.  This has happened.  I keep the exploded bead on my workbench as a reminder, as well as the chunk that landed on the seat cushion while I happened to be working from the seat.  This is the longest one I've made to date, and I didn't measure it because I couldn't find any measuring device.  They are all hiding and will in due course be found.  I had to pick a striking color because I like a challenge, in this case CiM stoneground.  The decoration is sis.

 This one is very pretty, but for this design I need more width.  I think I will wait until I have the masher to do something flatter.  The base is cobalt and the decoration is spirals of DH triton and aurae, feathered, reduced, and encased haphazardly in clear.  It is a pretty bead, but not one that works in this design.

My favorite of the lot, and one that, unfortunately, came up too short.  The base is Vetrofond extra light olive and the decoration is a twistie made from opal yellow and psyche.  I love the way the reduction on the psyche is so variable.  It really is a kind of rainbow effect.  This was a tough bead to make because the E.L.O. is really soft when hot and started to droop badly when I was applying the stringer.  As a result the center is not wonky, thanks to the marvering, but not as developed in color as I might have hoped for.  What do I want?  I very nearly had glass dripping on the table.  Some of the stringer is buried deep within this bead. 

In addition to continuing to work on my size perception (is there a way to mark the mandrel?) I have to work on getting the ends to look pretty.  Hmmm.

Double Helix psyche

Double Helix has a truly amazing line of glass, which I have only begun to dip my fingers into.  It changes color, goes all metallic, shifts color depending on the light source and generally is impossible to exhaust the possibilities of.  It is also a bit tricky to work on a HotHead torch.  Naturally, I have bought all the colors I can afford.  I won't use this all up since as my technique and studio improves I will continue to make discoveries.  Like this one.  Thanks to Pat Frantz and her blog, I know that psyche likes ivories.  So I rounded up most of  the obvious ones I have and tried it out.  So what did I find out?  It is indeed possible to really strike this color, you just have to really turn up the gas.  I've been making the beads in a moderate flame, then finishing them off low in the flame.  This isn't enough.  I have to make the bead, heat it to soup, then let it cool to no longer any hint of glow and turn the flame way up and reduce it low in the flame.  Then I get iridescence, in fact I get color change!

1 psyche stringer on opal yellow, then 2 is opal yellow on psyche.  I like the rim on the edge of the opal yellow but I didn't get any webbing.  I wonder if this might have struck to pinkish a little in the reducing flame.

3 isVetrofond river rock, then 4 psyche with some very thin river rock webbing.  I like the webbing on the river rock, but the psyche doesn't strike very well right next to the ivory.

5 is Vetrofond dark ivory and psyche stringer, then 6 is the same reversed.  The color change on bead 5 is not as visible on this photo as I would like, and I was too low on gas to strike the psyche properly on 6 but this is not as obvious an effect as on the other beads. 
7 is psyche with silvered ivory stringer.  Because of the thinness of the stringer and the lack of striking next to it, the psyche only reduced on the ends, but this bead bears further investigation.  I have to learn to make thicker stringer.  I either melt it all over the place and it's crooked or I pull it too fast and thin.

8 is Effetre sediment with psyche stringer and 9 is the reverse.  I got some really cool greens and blues out of the psyche on 8 and was running out of gas and didn't properly strike 9.

10 is psyche stringer on Vetrofond E. L. O.  This didn't do as much cool stuff as I could have hoped, but I wasn't making a very large bead and didn't get as many cool effects as I could have with a larger mass of glass.

11 is CiM khaki with a twistie made of psyche and opal yellow.  You can't really see the khaki under all the twistie I piled on but there is quite a bit of separation of the khaki near the ends.  Next time I'll leave more khaki showing.

All of them reduced far better than any previous efforts.  My favorites are the ones where the psyche went greenish.  Green and purple is a great combination.  I didn't get a whole lot of the webbing, but on the river rock and E. L. O., I got a tiny bit on the edges of the stringer.  I think I needed to superheat it more, but to be frank, I'm worried about dripping glass all over the place so when it gets really liquid I remove it from the heat.  I wonder if prolonged heating at a slightly lower heat would do this?

To the left is a picture of my first attempt to do something with psyche, not very convincing.  The left bead is encased over clear and reduced a little and on the right is encased, which does nothing for it.  Check out the triton next to it, now that's dramatic.  I like psyche as decoration better.  I flatter myself to think I understand it a little better now.

Vetrofond E.L.O.

A brand new color from Vetrofond! Frantz Art Glass calls it E. L. O. for extra light olive. My initial impression on viewing it in the rod form was that it was similar to CiM dirty martini. Not so much. Upon using it, I have come to the conclusion that it was an ivory that didn't turn out the way they thought it was going to. From that I'll go on to the bead pix because they say it all.

1 is plain spacer. If it were sitting on the table by itself I would think it was ivory.
2 is encased with Effetre super clear and I am still thinking ivory, even more so with the pinkish tone that seems to have occured with encasement.
3 is with silver foil melted in
4 is with silver foil melted in and encased.
5 is with turquoise. Note the grey line. I should have photographed my turquoise and ivory test bead for comparison.
6 is with intense black. I think it is interesting that the black remains crisp and clear and the ELO is curdled on top of it, kinda like ivory.
7 is with ivory, half ivory and half ELO, dots of each upon the other. With the lousy picture I took, the two are fairly indistinguishable.
8 is with dirty martini, separated with SIS, since the rods looked so much alike. Melted, they look very different. This says a lot about my skills in stringer application, but even more about how the finished bead will look. Look at it when it melts.
9 is with DH triton, encased in clear. Not much to look at, is it?
10 is with triton, on its own and reduced. The ELO goes yellowish, like ivory will in contact with silver. I believe this is indeed an ivory variant.

My overall impression: the jury is out. It is a nice color and I may find something that it does better than anything else, but for my money I'll take the other colors if I can save a few pennies. It isn't distinguished enough to make sure I always have some on hand.