plowden and thompson « Heather Kelly Glass

Lampwork: week 15

Posted by Kalorlo in Glass on July 22, 2010

[June 1 - 6]

The two on the right are CiM dirty martini bases, with a twistie of magic and hades on the rightmost, and MCD and hades on the other, then encased. The magic didn’t strike. (The MCD developed brighter colour after annealing). The other two are a white latticino twistie wrapped round a black base.

Twistie rounds

This one didn’t work very well, but it does show my rainbow murrini. It is a mid amber lentil with a couple of green twisties on top.

Rainbow murrini on lentil

I am really pleased with the way this one came out. It is a clear core encased in CiM khaki, with Kugler silver green frit that I reduced, then a bit of clear striped over the top, and some of my complex green murrini. I love the way it looks like it has water washing over it.

Khaki and silver green lentil

The Theme of the Month Challenge was June Bug this month, so I tried making ladybird murrini. I had to fight a bit with a huge gather, and I now know why people like stainless steel punties for pulling larger amounts of glass. The ends warped, so the ladybirds from there have no heads! They can be added onto a bead anyway, so they can still be used, but I would rather like some proper punties… (I have had no luck trying to use other glass rods as punties. Something always gets too cold and falls off/shatters exactly when I don’t want it to. I have been pulling my murrini using stainless steel chopsticks, which works well if they’re bullseye-style and you make a relatively small amount at once).

Ladybird murrini

And the colour of the month was Effetre 026 teal. I’ve included in the picture the teal hollow I made a while ago to show the batch variation you can get – it’s much bluer than the (probably older) batch I have more of. There’s a spacer, the hollow, three bases with different twisties wrapped round, and two with teal bases, white dots, more teal on top.

Teal

This is a periwinkle opalino lentil with trails of teal on top. It has a watery effect (looks better in person – in the photo the periwinkle seems to come more to the front).

Watery lentil

A ladybird bead: I made a core of lime green, added bome very fine black stringer lines and mostly encased it in dark grass green. Then I added my ladybird murrini, capped with clear and patted in a bit. (There’s one on the back I melted in flat and didn’t cap. It didn’t come out well). Then there’s a 3D ladybird I made in situ on a base of dark grass green. Finally there’s the METAtropolis bead take 1, with a P&T black oblong, white and mid amber dots and ladybird murrini.

Ladybird beads

Teal and CiM kryptonite lentil, with a twisted line of SIS around the centre and complex green murrini.

Teal and kryptonite lentil

METAtropolis bead take 2. P&T black tab shape, fine clear stringer for the brickwork and two handmade ladybirds. (P&T black will stay black under transparents).

METAtropolis bead take 2

P&T black lentil with vine cane and ladybird murrini that have been capped with clear.

Ladybirds with vine

Dark lavender and CiM kryptonite lentil, with SIS swirl and Jolene’s purple murrini. Dark lavender is a lovely colour, though it colour changes to blue under incandescent light (as here).

Dark lavender and kryptonite lentil

A sandy, beachy lentil. Ivory, silver foil and Jolene’s orange murrini.

Sandy beach lentil

Reichenbach caramel and flamingo testing. I did these because Melanie of MindMelt did some colour testing of flamingo, and her description of the rods she had sounded a lot more like the caramel I had. Since I had a rod of each, I thought I’d compare them.

Caramel and flamingo testing

L to R:
1. Clear lentil part encased in copper green, with flamingo trails. The copper green reduced a fair amount.
2. Caramel round (did this previously).
3. Caramel reduced.
4. Flamingo reduced – both these go metallic.
5. Copper green on caramel.
6. Copper green on flamingo.
7. Silver foil on caramel.
8. Silver foil on flamingo.
9. Clear, encased in copper green, caramel on left, flamingo on right.
I didn’t get such impressive results as Melanie, and the colours on top of copper green didn’t get the outlines hers did, but I have an idea why not. It has happened before for me that colours you would expect to get large reaction lines with (and which do when they are rounds) don’t do it nearly so much when I press them as lentils. I am suspecting that when I add the surface decoration to the lentil, the base isn’t getting hot enough for the glasses to react together properly. On the lentils here you can see some pitting on the top colour where the raised parts got too hot when I was melting them in, but they still haven’t properly sunk in to the base. Need to adjust my technique, I think. Possibly the copper green layer was also too thin in this case.

Anyway, my results do show that caramel and flamingo react in exactly the same ways in these tests. Caramel is just always browner and flamingo is always pinker. They both reduce to metallic like Reichenbach’s iris colours, and are very pretty doing so.

Ivory lentil with orange twisties from Jolene wrapped around. Thermal shocked, so it has a crack down the centre.

Orange twistie lentil

Reichenbach silver brown again: tiny cores and Laura Sparling’s thick encasing method. They’re better than my previous efforts, but I was still getting the inside too hot.

Silver brown

beads, colour testing, glass, lampwork, murrini, newbie, plowden and thompson, reichenbach, twisties

Plowden & Thompson colour testing

Posted by Kalorlo in Glass on June 7, 2010

[Weeks 9, 10, part 11: April 19 - May 7]

At the Flame Off I got some Plowden & Thompson 100 CoE glass so that’s what I had a go with next. (Plowden & Thompson are a British glass manufacturer that make 100 and 93 CoE glass).

I made a Plowden & Thompson Show and Tell thread on Frit-Happens! and I’m replicating my posts here. Other people have posted in it, and if anyone reading has anything to add, do go over there!

There’s very little information on what their colours actually look like (their website is somewhat notorious for not having any pictures, which is one reason why they aren’t used more by UK lampworkers) so I took pictures of EVERYTHING.

The sample pack I got (along with some clear and black):

P&T 100 CoE sample

You can see it tends a lot to the reds and yellows! I would have liked to try pinks and purples and some opaque blue, and I am definitely missing having white!

Here’s a shot of the ends of the red-orange-yellow rods. Pretty rings. I’m hoping some of the colour variation will remain after melting. (I expect the Misty Orange to, because… misty!)

P&T reds and yellows

My first impression: some of these rods are a lot thicker than I’m used to using! I think when you’re ordering from them you can specify what thickness you want, and the really thick ones weren’t too much of a problem. I was just very cautious with them!

I started with the Electric Blue (the cracked lentil below) and was immediately wondering what I’d let myself in for! It was a normal thickness rod, probably the thinnest in the pack, and I found it extremely stiff and also prone to boiling. A lot. So I was in the situation where the surface was boiling before the centre was molten enough to move, and I was trying to work as far out as I could. It was my first go with my lentil trio from Maria Louisa and I got a decent shape, but I mustn’t have heated it back up all the way through before putting it away. Probably because I was trying to stop it boiling! The colour is very similar to CiM Pulsar, but it boils more and is much stiffer. I quite liked pulsar, so will be keeping it over this.

Then I tried the Mint Green. Pretty colour, not too stiff. It seemed to start boiling just as I was finishing the shaping, but it’s not very visible on the cooled bead.

Dark Post Office Red: very thick rod, heated it carefully and tried to stay higher up after my problems with the first two. Didn’t get any boiling and it is indeed a dark red.

Golden Yellow lentil: nice ambery colour. My lentil didn’t break!

Water Green: what it says, really! Nice colour, though I have a pile of Effetre trans greens that I haven’t tried out yet. Might be similar to a pale emerald?

Vanilla: OMG I love this colour! It is beautifully soft and is what I think dark ivory *should* look like. It’s slightly darker in shade than my simple spacer of CiM Ginger (though I think you can get that to look pinker with more heating?) and is yellowy cream not pinkish. I will be ordering more of this. I’m already worried about using up my only rod of it!

Post Office Orange: a reddy orange. Not bad. Some swirling round the ends, so I think a lentil of this would have some streaks. My notes don’t say anything else, so I assume not much else happened! It didn’t boil, and was a big thick rod so took a little while to heat up, but not frustratingly so.

Then I got tired of making plain spacers that day so did a Daylight Blue base with Antique Green dots, melted in and then small raised daylight blue dots between. The blue was boily after a short while – there was one place with a lot of large bubbles coming up.

At this point I switched to trying my 2mm mandrels for the rounds, rather than 1.6mm. I’d used 2.4mm at the Flame Off because that’s what was available, and they took a little getting used to! I do prefer 2mm stringing material though, so I thought I’d start practising with more sizes.

Next day I tried Daylight Blue again on its own – it was still rather boily though not quite as bad as before. Very similar colour to Effetre transparent turquoise.

Antique Green: very dark as a spacer. I had to be a bit careful not to boil it, but it wasn’t as bad as the blues.

Misty Orange: I liked it. Not boily at all and the first colour in a while I could get hot without worrying about it. With the spacer it is translucent with striations round the holes, though mostly opaque round the centre. With a flatter shape you’d get lots of variation, and probably the hotter you get it the more opaque it goes.

Bright Orange lentil: I found this nice to melt, softer, and I thought it wasn’t boiling… but when I took it out after cooling I could see little brown burnt dots, mostly near the edges. The notes in P&T’s catalogue say that it’s a ‘difficult’ colour and is prone to pitting. Aww, it seemed easier until I got the bead out! I really couldn’t see the bubbles forming while it was hot. It has a dark amber wiggle and dots for decoration, then small black dots with raised orange on top.

Dark Amber: not too stiff, not boily. Very dark as a spacer.

Canary Yellow: quite an acid yellow, and it seems to stay semi-opaque. You can see little variation rings all round it and more pronounced at the holes. I am intrigued.

Burnt Orange: it’s a tangerine orange. Ditto with the variation round the ends, though it’s opaque round the middle.

Bright Orange lentil mk 2: trying again. I added black stringer squiggles over both sides, and was delighted when they came out a silvery pewter! The end of my black rod had gone silvery after applying the dots last time, so I had a vague suspicion that they might do this. Love this black! I seem to have half a kilo of it, so it’s just as well! (It was the pack size they had available at the time). I checked the catalogue notes afterwards, and indeed it says this this goes silver, though it says to work in a cool oxidising flame to do so. Apparently a normal hothead flame also works. Unfortunately I again ended up with some small brown bubbles on my lentil, though less than the first time.

Emerald Green lentil: this came out ugly. Oh well. It was stiff but not too boily, and a very thick rod – I was worried it might shock, but it was ok. I used a black, bright orange and dark amber twistie on it, which was probably a bad idea. The twistie looks pretty in itself, but I was really wanting some white to try it on. Not a good lentil shape, though I did accidentally start it on a 2mm mandrel rather than a thin one! Pressed ok, I think I just lost patience with melting the surface down enough.

Light Amber Eyeshell: it’s light amber. Not sure where the eyeshell comes in!

Cider: even lighter amber.

Royal Blue: another huge rod. Not bad once I’d heated it up enough! In a spacer it looks like Effetre cobalt blue – I’d have to test them over white to see if there was any difference in colour.

P&T spacers

Clockwise from top left: dark amber, dark post office red, post office orange, misty orange, burnt orange, light amber eyeshell, cider, canary yellow, vanilla, mint, water green, antique green, daylight blue, royal blue.

Then I did some additional tests of the vanilla and black. I made a vanilla round and rolled it in silver leaf, melted that in and put a wavy line of electric blue round the centre. This was to test if the vanilla does in fact react like ivory. Short answer: yes! Love the reaction, and I want to do one where there’s less silver on the base so I can see what it does round the edges.

With the black, I made a round, put a wavy line in stringer around it, then accidentally melted that too flat, so I melted it the rest of the way in and added the raised dots. What I was wondering was if I could get a black base with raised silver decoration – not with the additional steps! The base is dark pewter, in some places where the wavy line wsa melted in it boiled slightly and there’s a slight ‘elephant skin’ effect, like Lush!Julie gets from Effetre silver black. I want to see if I can do this on purpose. Then the raised dots are very slightly silvery, but darker and nearly black. Or possibly they are black and are just shiny
Anyway, I’m going to experiment a lot more with this one!

Top view

Lentils: electric blue, golden yellow, emerald green with twistie, bright orange with dark amber and black, bright orange with black (silvery).
The oblong one started out intended to be a lentil, but the bead release broke at either end so it could rotate. I had a skinny oval of clear and added a wrap of twistie round the centre and some misty orange dots, then squished it into a cuboid so the ends weren’t all pointy.

Angle view

Front: black, made silvery with raised dots; vanilla with silver leaf and wavy line of electric blue, daylight blue with antique green dots and raised self-colour dots.

In conclusion: vanilla and black are a hit. I don’t think I’d get any of the transparent blues or greens – I have plenty of Effetre ones and I found them much easier to work. Mint green is pretty, not sure if I need it. Have to see how the colour compares to Effetre grasshopper. And I think I’ll want to keep some of at least one of the oranges around, after further testing of how stripey they stay.

I think it’s going to be interesting to keep working with the colours I have here for a bit, because while I quite like orangey yellows in small amounts, I don’t usually use anywhere near as many as this! The only non-red opaques are vanilla and mint. I do want some of their diopal white.

I’m thinking I might try them over Effetre white – I asked if there were likely to be problems with that, and was advised to treat it like frit. Don’t mix too much of the different CoE glasses together.

—

I did some tests with the black. (Photo is with labelled mandrels so I didn’t get them mixed up!)

P&T black

1. Wound on, shaped quickly, didn’t leave the flame until it was done. Stayed black.

2. Took it out at the end, let cool so still glowing but not molten, flashed in the top of the flame. Silver!

3. I repeatedly heated and cooled this one. If you put it back in the flame after you get a silvery surface, you can see haze over the surface before it heats back to bright orange. I took it out while it was still hazy: it’s silver but slightly more matte.

4. Here I made the base, then added a stringer line and dots to the surface and melted them in. I was trying to get it to boil – it looked like it was a tiny bit, with white spots in areas, but that isn’t actually visible. I took it out and it looked black, so I heated it up a little again. It’s very slightly bronze-black rather than silver.

5. Black with silvered vanilla stringer. It went blue! It makes me think of galaxies. I’m going to get a better photo of this one on its own, as it’s rather pretty and totally not what I was expecting. Even the ends of the bead look pewter blue rather than pewter grey.

The black is mostly well-behaved, but a couple of times I got that dreaded glass-cracking ‘tink’ and the rod would shock straight across and a large piece would come off. This happened with bead 5 while I was winding on – luckily after the glass was attached enough to the mandrel to just wind the rest of it on. You can’t easily see *where* it’s shocked, either, which makes things interesting.

I obviously need to try harder with beads starting out lumpy to get it to boil! It did on my original black bead when I didn’t want it to…

P&T oranges

Next I checked the stripiness of the oranges. Here we have misty orange on its own, and burnt orange with mint florals, daylight blue on top of the larger ones, and canary yellow centres. The daylight blue didn’t really show up as anything other than ‘something transparent’. There’s a reaction line between the orange and mint, and also with the canary yellow. The yellow is very interesting as it’s definitely semi-transparent.

Conclusion: very stripy! I really like them both. Who needs Cool Colours? :D

—

Right, here’s a closeup of the black with SVS. It gets a line of actual black around the edge of the vanilla.

P&T black with SVS

Next vanilla with SVS. Mmm, humbug. So the vanilla itself isn’t very reactive (also there’s a bit more surface variation in the photo than there is in person, because of reflections – it’s a very smooth uniform colour between the lines). This was done over a core of clear. I haven’t mentioned the clear yet – it’s nice, fairly soft, and I’ve had it shock straight across like the black only once.

This one was interesting while I was making it, because the vanilla goes clear when it’s hot, so I was rounding off a bead that I could see all the way through, apart from the lines round it! NTS: make a clear bead with SVS.

Purty. I was hoping for a bit more of a reaction, but it’s very well-behaved.

P&T vanilla with SVS

And lastly, I decided to test all the mostly-opaque reds, oranges and yellows on top of mint green. Lines for all! The yellow is very definitely semi-transparent. The mint had lots of teeny bubbles coming to the surface after not very much heating, and just got more as I progressed. As a result its surface came out a bit strange – it looks like it has cling film on it in places. Am wondering what would happen if I selectively etched it.

P&T reds and yellows on mint

Side 1 has post office orange, canary yellow (semi-trans, looks green) and burnt orange. Side 2 has dark post office red, bright orange and misty orange.

—

P&T dotties

Here we have:
Canary Yellow lentil.
Black with vanilla wavy stringer. Still get the interesting effects! Again there’s a line of non-mirrored black around the edge of the vanilla.
Black with clear dots. Bit tricky to see here, the reflections are hiding them – the clear dots mean there are normal black dots on the shiny surface. It’s quite nice, if rather subtle.
Then there are three over Effetre white: royal blue, antique green, and emerald green. With the emerald green you can see slight separation lines in the white around the dots, like you get with frit.

It was odd going back to using Effetre white. It’s so very soft in comparison! When I go back to playing with my Effetre it’s going to feel like I can go super-fast :D

—

Many thanks to Julie of Lush Lampwork for sending me some diopal white! It arrived last weekend and I’ve been using it.

But first: I tried a tiny goddess bead in black (it’s less than 15mm tall) and my boyfriend requested an Anubis head. I like the goddess’ back better than the front – need to get Lavendercreek’s tutorial! The Anubis looks a bit more like a fox… Eyes are vanilla.

P&T black sculptural beads

Then I did a black lentil with vanilla stringer – I didn’t get it all entirely melted in, so there isn’t as much in the way of blue edges where it sinks in as there could be.

P&T black and vanilla lentil

I saw Lorna Prime’s demo at the Flame Off, and these were my first goes. More practice needed! My black stringer was too thick to begin with for the first one, and I think I’ll have to try more carefully and see if I can melt the black in more gently so it doesn’t go so rough. My line went wiggly at the start on the second one, so I went with it. First one is a cider base, second is clear.

Pixie lentils

Rounds:

P&T rounds

At the front is black dots over dark post office red – it spread more than I wanted so most of the surface is metallic rather than red! Right bead is vanilla and black trails over a royal blue base. Didn’t quite turn out as expected (I was thinking more smaller lines would be visible), but would make a great cloudy night sky if I could repeat it on a lentil.

The stripey bead, 2nd row right, is water green with dark post office red on top, stretched into lines by encasing with clear. I found this so much easier than the last time I tried it (with Effetre) because the clear melts quickly compared to the other colours. I’m not sure if it actually melts faster than a not-too-thick rod of Effetre clear, but after using this glass for a while, it sure feels like it!

The little black dots on diopal white bead is slightly metallic in the centre of each dot, but it’s hard to see. And the big bead is a mostly-collapsed hollow with black and diopal white dots on top. It was a bit challenging to place the dots, because the white goes totally clear when hot, so you need to let it cool quite a bit so you can see what you were doing.

The royal blue and burnt orange one at the back was a hurried affair as my bead release broke and I had a freely spinning bead when I was halfway through melting down the original disk. So I added the orange dots round the edge, finished melting it down and put it away fast.

—

And then I started playing with the frit I got at the Flame Off:

Multicolour dark frit on clear. I didn’t strike it properly and it looks better here than it does in person…

MCD frit on P&T clear

Beadysam frit on clear, diopal white and black (apart from the third, which is more MCD).

Fritties

L-R: Gem Surprise, Going Loco, MCD, Jungle Raku x 2, Dragons Candy, Deep Seas.
When melting in on the clear, I seem to have bubbled the surface. The Jungle Raku on black has thick black lines round the frit – the ends are metallic but the rest mostly isn’t.

Jolene’s frit blends on diopal white:

Frit lentils

Orange Grove over some black stringer, and Smokestack over some bright orange stringer.

Lastly, dark post office red with diopal white dotties. The white has made the whole bead look slightly fuchsia.

Red and white

—

Here’s the last of my current lot – I’m going to go back to playing with my 104 for a bit now.

Mint and white

Mint green with diopal white. The white sunk in a lot. The mint did its weird cellophane thing on the surface again, which I really don’t like. It’s a nice colour, but I think I’m going to have to keep it under encasement if it keeps doing this. I think I might etch this one and see what it looks like then.

Sea lentil

This is royal blue, water green and diopal white. The blue and green have a swirl in them too, but obviously you can’t see that at all.

If you want to try any of P&T’s glass, they sell over the phone only, or Sooz at The Bead Shed sells sample packs in both 100 and 93 CoE on eBay.

beads, colour testing, glass, lampwork, newbie, plowden and thompson

Heather Kelly Glass

Posts Tagged plowden and thompson

Valentine’s bead swap

Speedy beady catchup

Lampwork: week 15

Plowden & Thompson colour testing

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