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.

Now that's bizarre!

 This is a reaction I never would have thought to test for.  The glasses involved are CiM's beautiful peacock green and Effetre dark periwinkle.  The bead worked normally and went into the annealer just off red hot.  As the annealing cycle wore on, I began hearing the dread clink at around 600 degrees F.  I allowed the beads to cool, then removed them to discover this.  I did make a solid peacock green bead this size that did fine, so I can only assume that there is a slight incompatibility between the green and the periwinkle.  Check out the neat separation thing going on on the surface of the periwinkle.

 Kind of bizarre the way the  periwinkle sort of formed a clear bubble around itself that is reflecting itself onto the peacock green.  It seems to be sinkin in too.

 Tiny hairline cracks formed all around where the periwinkle was applied.

The cracks around the periwinkle really show up well in this picture, even though it's out of focus.  I couldn't get the camera to focus properly in this shot, but it shows the ruin better than any of the others.  What a bummer.  I would have liked this color combination.  I did something similar with Effetre nile green opalino that is holding up so far, so that will have to be the green and violet blue I was looking for in this piece.  Anyone have a similar experience?

Happy Earth Day!

Frustrations in photography

The difficulty of posting photos of my stuff is beginning to perplex me.  I keep saying (to myself still, thank God) why doesn't this look like the beads?  The answers to this are as complex as why the glass does what it does.  Add to this very little skill in actual photography or composition and I am frustrated as heck.  Colors look different against each other.  Dragonjools posted about this with a link to a site with magenta, orange and turquoise.  Colors look different with different light sources.  Witness the flower necklace pictures.  Colors look different with different cameras and monitors.  Where is the bead in this?

Above is a some fairly pretty beads using a base of 220 periwinkle and my miserable rose cane on the left and 256 dark pink opaque on the right.  We shot these on about 20 different backgrounds and this is the only one that showed what the colors even looked like.  I remember during school pictures the photographers sent home instructions on what colors to avoid when sending the kids to school on picture day.  Now I know why.  Surprisingly, the beads on the right, which I am calling pebble beads, look best on a sand colored background.  My friend Carol, who was taking the pictures, wished we had some sand to take the pictures on because they reminded her of pebbles too.  I suggested the cat box but that was turned down for obvious reasons.  We settled on the underside of a lid from her crock collection.Two of these are ivory with silver melted in and the middle one is CiM stoneground  with silver melted in and ivory dots topped with EDP.  I don't know whether I liked the way the ivory turned all black or not because all the spots did the same thing.  The EDP looks nice, though.

 I have another hundred photos of these beads against various backgrounds.  The top bead is Effetre 213 grasshopper and copper red green stringer, the middle one is copper green with a complex stringer of turquoise, cobalt and grass green opaque, and the bottom one is copper green with a copper green red stringer.  These changed color the least, but were the most difficult to photograph at the time.

Copper green red.  Beautiful if badly named color.  It probably is copper green changed in some way to produce the reddish tones, but the copper green turns turquoise and the red turns magenta.  The necklace beads are self copper green red and black spacers and the earrings are vetro black feathered with copper green red stringer.  The amount of color adjusting this photo took was stupefying.  Usually I just white adjust and save.  On this one I had to white adjust, normalize, hue and saturation adjust, color balance in all three levels, then white adjust and normalize again.  To get it to look like what the bead looked like in the first place.  The beads on the white candle were just white balanced.  Go fig.

periwinkles

Having just received the new periwinkle from CiM, zachary, I thought I'd do a comparison of the opaque periwinkles in my stash. From left to right, zachary, plain and encased, Effetre 220 periwinkle, plain and encased, and Effetre 222 dark periwinkle, ditto. No surprises here. I haven't done color testing, nor am I sure I'm going to. They all act pretty much the same way. They react with ivory, go toward the yellow/grey tones when silvered glasses and go lighter when encased. I haven't tried silver foil because any reaction that they would do sort of doesn't appeal. I plan to use them in florals, and they look very good when combined with transparent and opaque cobalt. For now, that is enough for me. In the opalino spectrum, there's Effetre opalino periwinkle, a very nice color that lies midway between their light and dark as far as saturation goes and CiM chalcedony, which I posted a picture of.

I have been working on getting some work for the event I am planning to merchant at in March and getting my etsy store up and running with usable pictures in it. I got a used kiln that was cheap and hopefully will do for now. This must do me for now.