CiM colour testing: September 2017 greens, oranges, brown

(This post has been on my to-do list since September…)

From Creation Is Messy’s September limited editions, I went for the selection of greens, oranges and browns first.

Here are the rods – we’ve got some striking going on here.

From the top: Jelly Bean, Canoe, Turtle Power, Monarch, Juniper, Harvest.

Pretty little barrels!

Greens

From left to right: Jelly Bean, Turtle Power and Juniper.

Jelly Bean is somewhat similar to Chartreuse in its glowing green, though is greener and less yellow, and is less transparent inside so the mandrel line is barely evident in these barrels. This is a soft colour when molten. Like many opalinos it can crack near the end of the rod when it cools, which is visible so you can melt it back in carefully when you next use the rod.

Turtle Power is indeed quite a turtly green. It is a middling green, neither bright nor muted, not too blue or too yellow. It comes out lighter than its rod and is streaky, as greens often are. Good organic kind of green. No rod issues.

Juniper is a darker, bluer green. Similar kind of tone – another good organic colour. Looks nice alongside Turtle Power, as they’re different enough to stand out next to each other. Again, it has darker streaks in it. I found the rod could be shocky when going back into the flame after cooling, and the first time in it peeled a bit at the cut end – it was fine when still a bit warm. When molten it was very smooth and viscous.

Orange and brown

From left to right: Canoe, Monarch, Harvest

This trio of colours together makes me happy!

Canoe is a striking silver-rich brown like Canyon de Chelly and the ASK/Kugler browns. It has some lovely light and dark streaks, and can go a yellower or redder brown. The rod itself was exceptionally well-behaved, especially as I had a slightly thicker one. With silver-rich colours some shocking at the end is fairly usual, and nothing of the sort happened here.

Monarch is the lighter orange. The end of the rod has struck lighter still, but the beads have blushed more orange in places, which I love. Monarch had an air bubble running the length of the rod, so was a little shocky.

Harvest is a deeper creamy orange. It also has some darker and lighter struck areas, though is less pronounced than Monarch. The rod was very good at going in and out of the flame – no problems with cracking.

I did a pairing off that gave some nice contrasting colours.

Monarch and Turtle Power

You can see the difference between the yellower- and oranger-struck areas of Monarch better here. There’s a dark reaction line between the swirl of Effetre New Ivory on the focal bead and the green of the Turtle Power, as you’d expect. No line on the Monarch side, just a fuzzing out.

Jelly Bean and Canoe

This pairing got a horizontal compatibility crack where the Canoe was deeply encased by the Jelly Bean, which is a shame as I really liked this colour combination. (I don’t think it was the New Ivory’s fault, though to be sure you’d need to test without it. An opalino over a silver-rich glass is a risky proposition). Replace with a transparent green for safety here, I guess. You can see the variety of shades the Canoe can get. When adding the New Ivory, it seemed to spread into the Canoe and not into the Jelly Bean. It has added some especially dark caramel tones on the border with the Canoe. You can see the mandrel line in the pressed Jelly Bean, but still see how far from transparent it is – gooey and misty.

Side view:

Harvest and Juniper

Nice combo – the more muted Juniper isn’t fighting with the bright Harvest. Handy pumpkin colours. There’s quite a lot of black webbing in the New Ivory and a dark line between it and the Juniper in only some places.

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CiM colour testing: Tiger Lily, Poppy, Heartthrob, Cinnamon Jelly

Creation Is Messy have sent me some more colours to test!

This post is for some juicy reds and oranges.

Tiger Lily

Tiger Lily is a semi-opaque/semi-transparent orange (whichever way round you prefer to describe these!). I used a core of clear for these gremlins, so you can see where that changes or doesn’t change the body colour. Here you can see there’s a difference between the body and lips, but the body is still opaque enough not to see through. It is also streakier.

Poppy

Poppy is a bright light red, also semi-opaque. It came out fairly uniform here, whether over clear or not.

Heartthrob

Heartthrob is a darker semi-opaque red, more of a blood red. This colour darkens more under halogens than the others, so is a tad brighter in sunlight, but still darker than Poppy. Again quite uniform in colour.

Cinnamon Jelly

Cinnamon Jelly is streakier and more transparent than the others – you can see that a bit at the corners of the mouth. It’s a dark orange-red.

Comparisons

Here’re the red gremlins side-by-side.

I also used these four colours to make dots over Effetre white. Tiger Lily and Poppy had a bit of a tendency to bubble on the rod as I was making dots, which are the smeary ones. Possibly should have done that cooler. I had the base shape a little smaller on the other two, so they fit the press better and were worked less.

Side by side, which stops the white bases melding into the background.

I made a pair of nuggets in each colour as well. You can see that Cinnamon Jelly is definitely the streakiest, and also the least opaque when used solidly like this. Tiger Lily and Poppy are lovely and bright, and again Heartthrob can look a little brighter in sunlight.

ETA: Here’s a pic in sunlight.

You can see Heartthrob is lighter, though we also have a problem with them all being oversaturated by the camera… The Heartthrob gremlin on its own is a reasonably accurate representation.

Nail Art catchup: Aztec Orange and Stormy Yellow

Aztec Orange

• Sinful Colors Cloud 9 (orange, might be 2 coats?)
• Sinful Colors Nail Art Time Off (black)
• Seche Vite top coat

I adore any and all sparkly oranges, and Cloud 9 is a fab one. I can’t remember whether I did 2 coats here, as it’s quite sheer. I did zigzags and dots with the Time Off black. Didn’t entirely get on with Seche Vite though, as it started peeling after a few days. I’ll have to try again with another top coat sometime :)

Stormy Yellow

• Revlon Sunshine Sparkle
• Rimmel Stormy Skies
• Seche Vite top coat

Sunshine Sparkle is quite a thin, runny polish, in a creamy yellow with a bit of sparkle that is more evident in the bottle than on the nail. (More coats might show it more, I guess). This was 2 coats. I’m not fussed about the not hugely sparkly nature of it, because I love this shade of yellow. (It is paler than both the other yellow colours I have used recently). Stormy Skies is a nice steel blue colour that I did lines, wiggles and dots with. If I was doing beads, definitely Lauscha dark teal (aka steel blue). Could be tricky doing the stringer work, since that is a very spreading colour. Might need encasing in clear first, or leaving raised.

I was impressed, this one lasted 8 days without too much chipping. I wore it to Flame Off because I didn’t have time to do any flame designs, so I was packing glass and beads, hefting them on and off the train, unpacking at Uttoxeter… then repeat in reverse to get them home again! So this combo gets on with Seche Vite just fine.

I have trimmed my nails for a bit of a change since these – new job, new keyboard, etc etc…

Dotty Fruit Salad beads

I did have a go at making these beads, based on my Dotty Fruit Salad Nail Art post.

The colours were a bit tricky.

I started off using Effetre pastel yellow and coral. The smaller rightmost tab used these colours and came out fine, but in the two larger beads both the yellow and the coral struck more towards orange, meaning that the colours weren’t so distinct. So I put the beads back in the kiln the next day and went over them again, this time in dark yellow. The dark yellow’s a little brighter and also not quite as opaque in the dots, so there are some smeary-looking areas.

Both yellows are really too bright if I wanted to match the nail polish better. I do have some Vetrofond banana cream, which can be pale but is also a striking colour (though definitely doesn’t go orange). Or I was thinking of mixing yellow and white and seeing if that gave me what I was after. It’s a difficult one!

Colour testing: CiM Orange Crush, Firecracker, Rudolph, Ocher, Sunset

In the limited edition reds and oranges section, I have three transparents and two opaques.

Orange Crush, Firecracker and Rudolph

I left these trios of spacers on the mandrel so you could see what the striking is like. I deliberately struck all three colours, which was not difficult. Orange Crush is an orange that strikes from transparent to misty. The bottom of the furthest out bead is transparent while the top is cloudy.

Firecracker is a medium light red with orange tones – you can see that the end spacer is less struck and much more orange.

Rudolph is a true red, and has less colour variation in striking. The end bead is mistier but is still red.

I also made lentil beads and small dotty rounds which have a core of Effetre white encased in the colour and then white dots. You can see from the lentils that both the reds go quite opaque, while orange crush has streaky translucent and transparent areas.

One of the orange crush spacers cracked on one end – that end had a thicker layer of orange and you can see that it went more opaque and lighter than the other bead – may have had something to do with it?

CiM Ocher and Sunset

Ocher is CiM’s spelling, I would normally write ochre :p

Ocher is a greenish mustardy yellow. Sunset is an orange coral type of colour. I could see Sunset striking as I worked, but it doesn’t really seem to unstrike again so I got a more uniform colour than I was expecting.

You can see in the spacers that ocher is bit streaky and the sunset is pretty uniform even as spacers.

I made a gremlin out of each to see how they did sculpturally – there is still variation visible in the ocher. The only lighter part of the sunset gremlin was the soles of its feet, which you obviously can’t see here! They are done at the very end. I used marine for the little heart on the ocher gremlin, and the sunset one has a scar and an awesome little skull murrini by Jolene Wolfe (Kitzbitz Art Glass).

I did some random thin stringer trails over a background of Effetre black. You can see a little bit of colour variation in the sunset dots, and also that at this thinness they aren’t entirely opaque, particularly the ocher.

Last of all, I did some tiny ribbed cylinder beads with ocher, sunset and Effetre dark sky blue. Ocher and the dark sky blue react together a little to give a dark out line, while sunset doesn’t. What I find interesting here is how different the ocher looks with other colours next to it – it is much yellower when alongside the sunset. Dark sky blue on top of sunset has a tendency to fuzz out and spread at the edges instead of having a sharp line.

I used dark sky blue rather than turquoise as it tends to grey up less. I did give them a bath in Lime & Grime to remove any that there was.

A-dabbling in nail art – marbled decals

I asked for (and received!) vast quantities of new nail polishes for Christmas, since I’ve started having a go at doing nail art again. I did a little bit of multi-colour and attempted patterns some years ago, but nothing like what people are doing now!

I like nail art because it’s a small decorative thing that is pretty much entirely for my benefit – I spend a lot of time at a computer, so looking down and being able to admire interestingly-coloured nails makes me happy. Also, it stops me biting my nails :p

There are so many nail art blogs out there now doing amazing things – I’m only just seeing what is possible.

So, just before New Year, I’d read this tutorial: Dry Water Marble Nails Tutorial on Nuthin’ But A Nail Thing’s blog. I have always loved marbled paper and this looked a lot of fun. I like the idea of making decals with nail polish that you then apply later, because that avoids having to paint left-handedly when I’m right handed.

I did mine on greaseproof paper, because another blog had mentioned parchment paper being the easiest surface to get the polish off. (I think what the US calls parchment paper we call greaseproof, but no idea if theirs is thicker). Well, it will depend on the polishes, but greaseproof paper didn’t work *that* well for me – the polish comes off, but it grips quite tightly and it’s tricky to get the edges up without stretching or tearing, and greaseproof paper is very thin, so also easy to tear with tweezers. Next time I will try on ziplock bags – someone else used a sheet of acetate.

Here are the marbled decals I made, anyway!

The top green and brown one was the first – I made my initial blobs a bit small on that one. I think the next two look a lot better. The neon one uses Models Own Luis Lemon (really neon yellow!), Pukka Purple and Dinky Pinky.

The glittery lime and brown one uses W7 Mojito and Collection 2000 maxiflex Mocha and Shiraz. I was impressed that the mojito works as dots on top of the others – it sits perfectly well on top of them and shows up as itself. Since it’s a transparent with green glitter, I wasn’t sure if it would stay dense or not.

I was really pleased with the orange one! It made such smooth dots that I didn’t marble it at all since it looked great as was. It is Topshop’s Venus Fly Trap (the lime), Stage Dive (the orange) and Pillar Box (red). Many thanks to my boyfriend for venturing into Topshop to get those! I didn’t even know they did a range of nail stuff, not been in there in years.

I was in two minds about the purple one – the colours bled a lot so you didn’t get clear edges, so I did fairly extreme marbling by dragging lines in all directions to get something that wasn’t too muddy. I tried using that one first, and it works really well! It was Revlon Chroma Chameleon Aquamarine, which is a colour-shifting blue to light purple metallic polish, plus Jess Moonflower and Breathless. Moonflower is a midnight blue satiny colour, and Breathless is a blue-pinky holographic. Looks bluish in the bottle, made all the pink glitter in the decal.

I decided to name this combo Midnight Garden because there are some decidedly foliage-like sections.

I did three nails per hand, over Collection 2000 Hot Looks Button Moon, which is a pale wintry blue. ‘Scuse edges, etc etc. Not quite at the professional finish stage yet!

The other nails are two layers of the aquamarine with one layer of Miss Sporty Sparkle Touch 889, which is apparently called Amethyst Dust – no name on bottle. Small pink, blue, red, silver and amethyst glitter. One layer is just a little bit of glitter. That’s what I had on before, so just left it on those nails as the base colour was the same.

I don’t have any fancy top or base coats as yet, so have just been using Collection 2000’s maxiflex clear. Being flexible, it’s easily dented and doesn’t stay quite as shiny as I would like.

Also, after a few days I had the rather disconcerting experience of having all layers of polish on my first finger fall off together! Look down, no polish at all on that nail anymore. I think I much have caught an edge on something and then the whole thing just came straight off, but without enough of a tug for me to notice as it happened. I tried putting one back on and it’s staying there as well as the others for the time being…

I’m keeping the rest of the decals sealed in a ziplock bag, so they hopefully won’t get too brittle.

52 earrings: #50 Emperor’s Orange

A very bright combination this time!

#50 Emperor’s Orange

I paired my bright orange swily lampwork cylinders with wooden discs painted a deep lapis or cobalt blue. They’re wire-wrapped onto large rounded copper earwires.

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 49 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk