Lauscha Caramello test results

I did some testing of Lauscha SNO 630 caramello recently.

It’s a creamy, caramelly warm beige that looks good with reduced silver leaf. It’s also really nice to use instead of white in black-and-white scrollwork beads, for a warmer but still crisp and elegant look.

You can see the full results here: Caramello Testing on Lauscha.co.uk.

Dots

February’s theme of the month was dots! I mentioned it when I showed my pink dotty heart a couple of posts down, but here’s the rest of what I made.

Psyche and opalino dotties

These are psyche dots on nile green opalino and white opalino. You can see that the silver glass has fumed the white and has also affected the colour of the green.

Dotty BHBs

These big hole beads have dots in periwinkle, rubino and opal yellow. The bead on the right has a base of tongue pink (half struck) and the other two have a base of CiM plum unique-3, which is much paler than normal plum. You can see it’s formed darker separation lines under the dots.

Adamantium BHBs

These BHBs are CiM admantium with dirty martini and mermaid dots. They spread so I didn’t get crisp edges on these.

Marmalade set

These beads have shards made from Lauscha brown/white layered rods on a white background. I was thinking the layers would show up over the white, forgetting that the layers *are* white and so don’t look different at all! They were visible in the shards before I applied them, though :p
Next time I try it over clear.

I do like the effect – they’re marmaladey and I added Kaz murrini and opaque light red dots.

Terra 2 BHB

A BHB in black with terra 2 dots topped with clear. There’s more iridescence in person.

Valentine’s bead swap

The beads from the FH Valentine’s Bead Swap arrived! Here are the three lovelies I received:

Valentine's swap: received

Beads by Terri, GlassOwl and Anna (ShinySnail). Anna’s is sparkly and I have a suspicion may involve the fabled pineapple sparkle!

Here are the beads I sent.

Valentine's swap: sent

Three off-mandrel hearts. One in Lauscha transparent pink with a silver glass twistie. One in Lauscha caramello with psyche. One in Plowden & Thompson black, which goes metallic. I gave extra heat to some areas so it developed some surface texture.

I resolved to take part in more Frit-Happens swaps this year – it’s lovely to get little packages through the post with surprise glass beads in them! I also find that swaps get me doing new things – I don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time making hearts if not for this one and I’ve really enjoyed it. (I am also confident now that I can make beads of good enough quality to send out to other lampworkers! Which can be the scary bit).

The latest UKJC spring charm swap has also kickstarted an obsession with an entirely new technique for me, more about which later…

Further experiments in silver glass

For my Double Helix seconds, I ordered Psyche, Ekho, Kalypso, Terra 2, original Pandora (just to try as it was very on sale) and Aether. They’ll keep me going for quite some time!

Terra 2

This is terra 2. I struck, reduced and encased it (because terra 2 can get some reduction shine too) and pressed it as a kalera. But during one of the pressings it got too cold, cracked and spit off a chunk of one side at me. I filled that in with clear and healed the cracks but my colour in this bead isn’t great. It has a little bit of stormed supernova twisted on one end – should have put that over an opaque for a better effect. It also has a little bit of coral stringer. I think the colour I got would have been ok as a backing if I’d added more surface decoration to make that the focus instead. The back is slightly purpler in places.

Terra 2

This one’s also terra 2, but it worked much better. It’s over carrot red. I tornado wrapped it, leaving little gaps for it to reach the surface. I used the top of my big Cattwalk lentil to mash each side against my torchtop marver, since I don’t have a large enough crunch press to do this. It’s got a Kaz striking murrini on one side, dots of aurae and a couple of twists. I reduced the surface. I really like this one – it has shine and colours and purple and I like the way it still has little curves leftover from the tornado wrap.

Terra 2 - another angle

It’s a nice shape to hold, basically.

Kalypso blot

This one’s a bit weird. It had a bead release failure at one end, so I had to do some hurried pulling off of glass to stop it becoming stuck to the mandrel. Bad bead hole at that end – I’m just impressed it came off! It’s kalypso with clear dots on one side plus a murrini I made. Not sure the recipe for that one is very successful. Anyway, you can see that the kalypso’s over-reduced/overstruck because it’s gone that white MOP look in places.

Kalypso blot - back

Here’s the back. Those aren’t cracks, they’re just because I encased it lengthwise in stripes and some of the stripes weren’t pushed close enough together so there are some little ridges. This bead didn’t turn out how it was supposed to, but I actually still kinda like it.

Psyche and kalypso

This one didn’t turn out as intended either – the base is kalypso on white and the interior colour is nothing to write home about. But! Psyche is my new best friend – I put a caterpillar of it around the bead and a surface twist at the top, and the colour contrast makes it not matter so much that the kalypso was unsuccessful.

Webby aurae

This one also went weird, but I really like the effect. It’s aurae that I accidentally made all webby, tornado encased in baby blue. I added one of Kaz’s striking murrini and the bead got too cold and cracked while I was doing it, so I had to reheat it all the way through.

Webby aurae - back

If you look at the ends of the bead the aurae shows up as blue-green wisps, while in the centre it’s more solid. Psyche dots on top. I just like the whole effect – it’s quite subtle and less bling, and I’ll happily make this into something for me to wear. I should try this again, since I like the effect the encasing colour has.

Kalypso

Finally, this is just encased kalypso. I didn’t actually use a reduction flame for this at all, just rolled it in a neutral flame before encasing. It’ll develop a sheen anyway. I’m finding it harder to encase rounds than pressed beads with silver glass – they’re smaller and you have to get them perfectly even. You can see that I still got this one too hot in places. I messed this bead up a bit by rolling it in my doming block to help the shaping – there was some dust or something in there and now I have black streaks on the surface! Whoops. From looking at this, you’d assume it had a red core, but it’s all kalypso.