CiM colour testing: Velveteen, Toto, Allspice

These were the new CiM limited edition colours out in spring 2016. I am somewhat behind on writing this post as Flame Off happened…

Also, I got into fountain pens recently, and decided to use my post to practise my italic handwriting so that I got both the thing I had to do and the thing I wanted to do done. Pics thereof at the bottom.

Velveteen

This is a pale peachy brown opalino that can develop mottled striations on the surface. I made four spacers and etched two of them; they do etch and it makes the striations more visible.

I made a pair of rounds with 006 clear cores. One has a band of silvered ivory around the centre, and the other has a couple of wraps of fine silver wire, melted in so it balls up. There’s a bit of brown fuming from the silver – not a huge amount. The SIS wrap has a clearly demarcated edge and has not spread a great deal.

I made a sculptural gremlin (with bunny ears – could do with a redesign!) with a clear core. It is opaque enough not to have the teeth show through the lips, which is a disconcerting look when it happens. The striations are easiest to see on the body, which is worked longest, but there are also a couple of larger dark areas on the ears.

I did a little silver glass testing. First is a bead with a clear core, encased in Velveteen, with a stripe of Double Helix boreas. This was reduced (oxy down) and encased. There’s some darker brown fuming and the boreas is a lovely bright iridescent purple with some mottling.

The second silver glass bead has okeanos instead, again reduced. It has ended up with a variety of colours, from yellow-green to light turquoise to deep blue, again with interior mottling. The stripe has remained thin and not expanded. In the centre of the bead, there is a pronounced dark line at the edge of the silver glass, bordered with a light greenish and the deep blue pushed into the centre of the stripe.

Toto

Toto is a soft milky brown with a touch of grey. My spacers came out a uniform colour. The etched pair look softer and lighter.

This pair of rounds have cores of 006 clear encased in Toto. One has a wrap of silvered ivory stringer which has spread and fuzzed at the edges. The surface has some darker grey areas. The second bead has two wraps of fine silver wire around the centre, melted in. It has fumed a dark brown line where the silver has melted in.

My sculptural gremlin is a fairly uniform colour on the front – it has some of the darker grey visible on the back and the soles of the feet, which are cooled swiftly when I flatten them.

Silver glass beads: core of clear, encased in Toto, spiral of silver glass which is reduced and encased in clear. The first bead uses boreas, which has not come out well – it is mostly a greenish brown with only the slightest patch of iridescent purple. The base is visible as a dark brown next to the boreas. The okeanos came out much better and has struck to blue-purples with green at the ends. The Toto shows through as a warmer brown with separation lines where it meets the okeanos.

Allspice

Allspice is a fairly dark amber brown opalino. Used on its own, the spacers are a lovely warm and deep colour. The etched spacers have a nice inner glow.

The pair of rounds with cores of 006 clear and surface decoration have a wrap of silvered ivory stringer and a couple of wraps of fine silver wire. The SIS has not spread much and has sharply defined edges. The silver has a small dark outline immediately adjacent. These beads both have some mottling in the surface of the Allspice. (So do the spacers a little, but it isn’t so evident to the naked eye).

In my sculptural gremlin, the Allspice is just thick enough for the white of the teeth not to show through. There is only visible surface mottling on the back.

In my silver glass beads, the wraps did not spread and the edges and swallowed, giving very narrow bands. These beads have a core of clear, encased in Allspice, a spiral of silver glass, reduced and encased in clear. The Allspice has visible mottling. The boreas has a shiny band of purple surrounded by a darker brown – the same colour as the mottles. The okeanos has narrow very dark edges surrounding the centre stripe with ranges from brighter to darker blue, with some lime green near the holes.

Handwriting

For anyone interested in fountain pens.
Here is my normal handwriting, where I composed the text. I can write reasonably straight without guides.

These were written with a recently-acquired Osmiroid 75 fountain pen with an italic extra fine straight nib. The ink is whatever was in the pen – I’d just added enough water to get it going and decided to write it empty because I just discovered piston fillers take forever to clean out by sucking up and expelling water… You can see it ran out during the third composition – I’d added more water but it was too faint by then so I finished cleaning it.

Here’s the first go – this was still with the old ink. I’d printed out some guide paper and this was the first time I’d used it. I was trying to get it all on one sheet (and failed) hence the lack of paragraph spacing. I was also putting one letter in each grid box, meaning my spacing is rather odd – the ‘m’s are very squished and some words are over-expanded. I used this calligraphy paper PDF generator printed out on my normal printer paper.

I aso realised I hadn’t practised capitals at all…

Second post: ink had run out so I refilled with Diamine indigo. The two look closer in the pics than they should – the original ink was a nice blue/blue-black and indigo has more of a steel grey tint in it. This time I used slightly smaller paper – 0.5 rather than 0.6mm nib size, and with halfway vertical guides too. I mostly ignored the guide boxes this time, just using them to go vaguely in the right direction and not for spacing. Also less obvious in the photo, it starts out with wetter writing so the letters are darker, then for the rest my writing angle must have changed, as I have drier writing and it also gets bigger. That was partly the fault of writing without bright enough light coming from the right direction, as I couldn’t always see the guidelines… The part at the bottom is darker and smaller again. I couldn’t work out how to write the correct s at that size – it’s supposed to be a narrow letter and it was very difficult not to write it wider.

Third: I went back to the bigger size but kept the extra verticals. It’s looking a bit better, though still various irregularities.

Some practise, may also show the ink colour difference a little.

Big practice, back with the Lamy Joy and 1.9mm nib. I managed the s shape once or twice at this size!

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CiM colour testing: Moccasin, Autumn, Eucalyptus

New colours to test! These are the three that I picked out first, pretty autumnal opaques.

Moccasin is the milky mocha brown, Autumn is the peach, and Eucalyptus is the muted green.

They don’t strike differently when making multiple spacers – all very uniform colours.

This Moccasin gremlin has a little bit of Autumn on the shoulder – I wanted to see how much they stood out against each other. Moccasin was nice and smooth to work with.

Autumn is a really lovely colour (there are not many opaque peaches!). It does have tiny micro-bubbles that come to the surface, pop, and leave little marks. These did not show up in the spacers, but do in the gremlin, particularly on the back. (There are a few on the front too but they are less obvious). The rod was also fairly shocky for me – it shot off a number of hollow cone shapes when returning the rod to the flame (rather than solid chunks, which is more usual).

Back showing pits from micro-bubbles.

Eucalyptus is a faded blue-tinged green. As a sculpture there’s a tiny bit of streaking in the colour on the flatter expanses, but not much at all.

I then made some rounds to test reactions. These are all over cores of Effetre 006 clear to make them go further. This pic has them in pairs, moccasin and autumn bases with the same treatment (apart from the rightmost two, which are moccasin bases with dots of autumn or eucalyptus).

Here are all the moccasin bases together.
1) Two wraps of fine silver wire. It has darkened where the wire has actually melted in, but not fumed the rest of the bead.
2) Copper green dots. They have a crisp line round the edges and the copper green itself has greyed up a little (haven’t soaked these in anything to remove it) but there’s not much else going on.
3) Covered in fine silver leaf! This has a greenish sheen.
4) Autumn dots. This has made some streaks in the moccasin underneath, otherwise clean dots.
5) Eucalyptus dots. Very smooth join between the colours – nothing has spread or shrunk.

The autumn bases:
1) Two wraps of silver wire. Again very little fuming.
2) Copper green dots. Same effect as moccasin.
3) Fine silver leaf – colour is brownish as expected.

So, moccasin and autumn are two fairly unreactive colours that keep their original look and smoothness most of the time. Should test for silver glass bases.

CiM colour testing: Mahogany and Cobblestone

Mahogany

Mahogany is a really nice warm opaque brown, that is properly brown rather than dark red.

I used Tiger Lily for the pumpkins on this gremlin, and you can see that the opacity varied a lot. Some of the pumpkin segments stayed very transparent.

These bicones have a base of Mahogany, with a wrap of Poppy round the centre, and the largest has a thin wrap of Tiger Lily on top of that. This was in the same sessions as the gremlins, so I didn’t actually know they weren’t opaque at that point! Tiger Lily especially looks pretty opaque in the rod. So the result is rather more subtle than I was expecting.

Cobblestone

Cobblestone is a nice slightly brownish grey. Fairly uniform and non-streaky here.

I used Double Helix Okeanos on top of Cobblestone here (unreduced), and got some fab colours! The Cobblestone has fumed darker and browner around the dots especially. Showing both sides, as one is bluer and one greener.

Mixed rounds

I decided to do more combos with Mahogany. These are small rounds with a tiny core of clear, to make my rod of Mahogany go further. Definitely a true opaque! I wrapped one in fine silver wire, the next has a wrap of SIS, then Cobblestone dots, a spiral of black, and finally spreading dots of Reichenbach Kermit (a special: SPL1000).

I did the same thing with Cobblestone, here you go:

They’re both nice colours to use like this, and look great with each other, both staying crisp in the dots. They are both somewhat reactive with the silver, ivory and green, but not overwhelmingly so.

96 coe (ish) colour testing, part 2 and pinks

Here’s last weekend’s haul of beads. I made a lot of small pairs this time because my stash of small beads was hugely eaten into at the Flame Off and I’m running out of earring beads! (I had an orphan bowl where I’d just poured all my usable leftover and test beads that dated all the way back to when I started lampworking and was charging £5 to fill a small ziplock bag. It was quite popular! I’d never have used them all myself, so that was good, but now I do need a few more).

Honey yellow and Orange Grove frit

To begin with, I made a pair of little cylinders in R 0017 honey yellow with granny apple green frit. The honey yellow opacifies a lot.
I also made a pair of frit painted cylinders using Plowden & Thompson clear and Jolene Wolfe’s Orange Grove frit. These are neon bright!

Pastel green and isar blue

This next pair of colours are reaction tests. I made pastel green bases and put fine silver leaf on top. This was to double-check the result I got last time. Yep, the leaf definitely goes a lovely darker colour. Heating and cooling did seem to develop the colour after the initial melting in of the leaf.

I also tested iris gold frit on isar blue bases. The iris gold is dark brown in the centre with a yellowish ring around the outside, and the isar blue has developed separation lines in its surface.

Lemon yellow and isar blue

The blue pair have an isar green base, with pastel green dots, steel blue transparent dots and more pastel green dots. The pastel green is decidedly translucent in this application – the first row of dots in it don’t really show at all, having been swallowed by the blues. The steel blue is tinting the top dots.

The other pair are vanilla and lemon yellow stacked dots. The lemon yellow is something of a transparent olive in the rod – fairly saturated but not so much as to look black.

Old rose and heliotrope

These cylinders have a base of old rose and then heliotrope stacked dots. The heliotrope fuzzes out at the edges and pushes the old rose around.

Pinks and purples

Caroline at Beadbug has a sample pack of all her Reichenbach pinks and purples: these are the opaques. Aren’t they pretty? No devit here – they seem to strike a little, though I have no idea if they’d do that once in the kiln anyway.

In order from pink to purple: old rose, soft rose, opal dense rose, coral pink, opal raspberry, lilac red, opaline pink.

The opaline pink is oddly named in my opinion, as it’s the darkest purple one here. The coral pink is noticeably redder than the others.

Vanilla Carousel

Finally, a set of tiles. Vanilla, opal dense rose, opaline pink, isar blue (including a twistie made from the vanilla and pinks).

Of earrings and business cards

I made some earrings last week that are now up for sale at HeatherKellyGlass on Etsy. They’re my own lampwork beads: green core encased with clear and with red-orange dots on the surface. I wire-wrapped the beads onto fine silver headpins (that I made with my soldering torch!) and dangled them from my handmade sterling fancy earwires, so they can dance about as you move. They *can* be festive if you like, but they’re also suitable for wearing all year round.

I finished doing my DTP for designing business cards and stickers last night, so my order to Moo.com has gone in. If you sell on Etsy, you can get a free pack of 50 full-size business cards from Moo – they have a small Etsy logo in the bottom left of the photo side. It’s worth going through to the image upload section before you design them fully so you can see where the logo will go, especially if you’re putting your business name on that side. I had to do a quick bit of moving things around, but I think they look rather good now, if I do say so myself! I refreshed my Mini Moo card designs at the same time and ordered a new pack, plus a sticker book. Cos I like stickers! Now I will have stickers with close-ups of my beads on them! Moo’s 30% off sale ends tonight – if you don’t have time to get in there, I’ve got a referrer link that should give you 10% off if you’re a new customer (and it gives me some points towards an order).