Onto other stuff

Sefko, I'm sorry I missed you.  Have a safe trip and enjoy your family.  When you're ready, so's your necklace.

What has this to do with what else I've been working on?  Absolutely nothing.  I'm sick of trying to figure out why what is supposed to be Effetre dark periwinkle is having compatiblility issues with everything I put it on, all of a sudden.  It is probably something different, but I have no idea what, as I only use COE 104.  CiM grumpy bear and Effetre light periwinkle split too and I'm sick of fooling around with it.  As far as I'm concerned, I somehow managed to get a weird stringer and the rest has already been thrown out.

 This is a cool thing I've been able to get Effetre dark silver plum shards to do.  I wrapped a bead of Effetre Sedona with shards of silver plum and super heated them.  I got lace.  Cool.  The silver plum stayed plum, which is cool, but I couldn't get Sedona to do its tricks.  Still cool.  The slip is showing on these beads, because I couldn't bear to waste glass making a whole bead out of Sedona.  Now I'm going to have to see if it does it on other colors.  I had some CiM cirrus on the bench and tried it there but it didn't lace and it went metallic.  EDP would be a waste of time, since EDP and Sedona act very similar.  Maybe a green or blue.

Effetre sedona

Here's a color that I think is pretty, although others may disagree, Effetre sedona.  At its best its a complex light purple.  Purple.  What's not to love.  It does ugly things with silver.  I can live with this.  Here are the pix:  1 on its own.  2 encased. 3  with silver.  Did I mention it does ugly things with silver?  Now you know.  4 is with silver foil, melted in and encased.  Talk about wasting glass.  5 is with aurae, melted in and reduced.  See the comment for bead 3.  6 is same encased.  Why I thought this would make a difference I have no idea.  7 is  with ivory.  I was having complex heat and stringer control problems here, but I believe the general effect is that since sedona is a gold bearing glass it will not play nice with ivory.  That having been said, it did neat things in the one I did with sis on the separate picture, but that was intended to have a separate decoration.  8 is with copper green, and I do not believe I have had a color that shoves it to the back burner like this one did.  Wild.  9 is with CiM tuxedo.  Again, black is usually a color you have to be careful with.  Not so on this baby.  She holds her own.  10 is with metallic black scrolls.  One thing that is very difficult to do, with its tendency to devitrify, is "strike" metallic black, or plum silver, for that matter.

Still, a great color, and when my current stock runs out I will be buying more.  Did I mention I like purple?

effetre metallic black

This is one that everyone but me knows how it looks and what it does, and has switched to dark silver plum or gunmetal to save on cost, but I had to do it. It is similar to dark silver plum in the lustre that it creates and the method I have to do it on my HotHead, but the tonality involved is very different in a subtle sort of way. Does that sentence make sense?
1 is by itself heated very gently for quite a while to really make it pearlize as much as it was going to.
2 is the same bead with dark silver plum scrolls. The plum predominates on the visual impact and this is the real difference.
3 is encased, and the pearly effect was lost, with no surprises all around.
4 is with copper green red and this is a beautiful bead. The color is like a moon on the water or something equally poetic. Just plain pretty.
5 is on top of Effetre intense blue. I still have some kinks to work out on my lentil press. Pressing the bead does accentuate the pearly process, which is what I was trying to find out.
6 is with triton and 7 is with aurae. They are supposed to be brother and sister and they seem to be on these beads. On 6 you have steel and on 7 you have purpley gold. On both beads, the pearl effect is extinguished where it comes in direct contact with the silver glass.
8 is with opal yellow stringer because the plain ivory was buried under a pile of other stringer. This says a lot about my worktable and something about the colors. The two aren't all that much alike, are they? Interesting zoo effect, though.
9 is with sis and all I can say about this bead is that it is prettier in real life. What was I thinking?
10 is on Effetre sedona as stringer. Getting the metallic black to do its thing while not devitrifying the sedona was no mean feat, and I like this color combination. A sucessful bead, all in all.
11 was with EDP stringer, and all I can say in my defense is that the EDP struck nicely. Getting the metallic black to go all pearly and not devitrifying the EDP is something I dare anyone to try.

Will I buy this glass again? Yes, when my current stock runs out. How much will I use? I don't know.

slow-cooked beads

Well, the kiln isn't going to work, and there's no way I can make it do so.  It heats up way too fast and cools down too fast as well.  So how can I slow down the cooling process enough to stabilize larger beads?  I'm not talking about beads that use an entire rod or more, just larger than the 1/2 inch or so I've been doing.  I particularly want to do beads on silver core liners and 3/16 mandrels and there's 3/4 inch if the bead is to be as thick as the mandrel or more.  I decided that the annealing bubble I was using was ok but soaking up too much heat from the beads.  I have a crockpot I hardly ever use and the high heat setting is about 350 degrees.  This isn't the 500 - 900 degrees a kiln would give me but it will slow down cooling a bit.

 This worked out fairly well, with one failure pictured below.  The bead above is  my experiment with fine silver wire.  Not much but I'm learning and will try more later.  I like this bead made on a silver core.  It's just dark ivory with sis but the core does add to the bead.  I wish I had done the sedona and sis bead below on a core now, too, but how would I know the  sedona would develop such a neat color cast.  Joe asked me why the ends were all rough, like porcelain, and after stifling the urge to throttle him I explained that some glasses devitrify and lose their glaze.  I like the way the edge is, and that is the part that will show, anyway.

 I thought the Effetre sandstone was very much like ivory, and it is.  Below is a bead 1/2 sandstone and 1/2 vetro ivory with dots of one on the other.  Pretty darn similar.

 To testify to the efficacy of the crockpot arrangement, here is a bead made with CiM peacock green and Effetre dark silver plum that's over 1/2  thick and didn't crack.  I didn't squash it either, but I didn't want to push my luck.  The deformed bead below wrapped with silver wire was my first effort, with the torch running out of fuel just as I finished wrapping the wire.  I relit it and cracked the bead, but it stayed together long enough to reheat and melt together somewhat before I ran out of gas again.

There is just no excuse for this one, other than I think I was looking at it too long.  Too bad, it would have been nice.  I wonder if the core can be salvaged?