Tried & True: Effetre 232 Light Turquoise

  Turquoise seems to be a staple color for many glass beadmakers. It’s definitely one for me too, but perhaps not in the same way as many of my contemporaries.

I have a confession - and it may not come as much of a surprise to those who’ve seen lots of my beads.  I know very little about working with metals in beadmaking.  I’ve seen it done everywhere - and I know the simple basics - but I personally have never used any metals in making my beads, other than what’s contained in the glass I use.  **hangs head in shame**.

Where am I going with this?  Well, as many veteran beadmakers know, metal foils and leaves work really well with the several glass colors in the green/turquoise/blue range. There’s lots of info on that in places all over the web, but you’re not going to see it here.  Neener neener!

Seriously, I love Turquoise (specifically the light version) for an entirely different spectrum of reasons.

Light Turquoise opaque glass is probably one of the first colors I picked up when learning how to make beads.  It’s pretty and quirky at the same time. It’s versatile and has some really interesting reactive qualities, even before you add any metals to it.

The first thing you might notice when melting a rod of Light Tuquoise is that it tends to be a bit shocky.  Not overly so, but enough to where you want to introduce it to the flame slower than usual, to avoid flying shards of glass breaking away from the tip. Maybe even heat the end of your rod in the kiln or on a hot plate just to make sure.

The glass is nice and soft without being soupy, and cools neither slowly or quickly.  Just your basic opaque in that manner.  After you heat it up, it goes a bit greener than the rod until it cools.  You may also notice a bit of color striation and even a bit of silvering or greying at the holes when it’s allowed to cool.  The more fuel in your flame, the more this glass will grey - this is normal for this glass because of the metals it contains.  Once the glass cools, it will return to the same color as the rod, with a little bit of discoloration in places.  You can easily remove the discoloration with some acid etch or even toilet bowl cleaner.  (use either with caution, please!) 

 As a base, this color is true and lovely.  Shown here with layers of red flowers - you can see the color doesn’t bleed or suck up most colors it’s used with.

 

 

Here you can see some of the color striation on these cubes, where Lt Turquoise was used as a plain base and decorated with bright green and purple raised stringers. Sometimes these striations can be mistaken for cracks in photos, so you might want to make sure to tell your customers if you’re selling the beads you make.

The true bliss of this color for me is its layering capability.  It layers wonderfully with many, many shades of blue, green, teal and aqua - so much so that I use it almost exclusively as a base layer for most of the transparents in the same color wheel section.

 

 

Turquoise looks delicious with brown, and is seen here as a base layer for Pale Aqua transparent glass, giving off a nice robin’s egg blue effect.  This color combo is really popular for me, and I adore doing it. 

When you melt encased brown stringer on to the Turquoise, you are awarded with a nice organic look when the Turquoise darkens a bit.

 

 

 

 

Of course, there’s nothing better than bright aquas and vivid greens - and you can pair them by using turquoise as the base.  Layering some of the more yellow based greens over Turquoise really brightens them up almost to a neon look. 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, different colors will give totally different looks - you can’t see the turquoise here because it’s layered under the Teal - Both Light and Dark Teal transparent glasses look great over Turquoise.

Not to mention the newer and even more beautiful CIM Leaky Pen, shown below over Light Turquoise.

I’m so glad this is one of Effetre’s basic production colors, because it’s one that will remain in my arsenal forever.

 

 

 

Rising Star: Vetrofond 958 Pajama Blue

Soft, muted and cozy - just like your favorite pajamas!  Vetrofond named this glass perfectly - it’s such a warm, lovely color.  It fits right into the blue-green palette - it’s a bit more muted and saturated than Light Sky Blue, but lighter and fluffier than Light Turquoise. I’m totally in love.

Pajama Blue came out as an Odd Lot I believe, sometime earlier this year. Most vendors do have it in stock as of this writing. It’s not too expensive, either - yey!

Pajama is an opaque color, and keeps its wonderful opacity even when spread out.  It reacts a lot like Light Turquoise when paired with any dark color.  Small striations of color appear when the glass is layered, creating some pretty effects.

I like to compare this color with Light Turqoise, because it really works very similar - it’s not too stiff, not too soupy - even for an opaque. It also can reduce for a little bit of greyish metallic near the holes of the base, but not nearly as much as Turquoise. It’s a pretty stable glass otherwise - it won’t spread too much when placed on other colors. And it doesn’t overtake colors, either.

I haven’t used this lovely color with some of the traditional reactive friends that Turquoise has (like Opal Yellow, Purple, etc.), so I am not sure of the reactive properties yet, but I can imagine that it’s very similar to Turquoise in that regard. It does create reactive brown lines when layered over Ivory, as most opaque blues do.

I love this color with browns - as seen in a set of beads below.  I will definitely be adding this one to my regular stash for as long as they decide to make it!

Tried & True: Lauscha Cocoa

Nothing warms me on chilly, icy evenings like a cup of cocoa!  This glass color from the german Lauscha line is just like that - warm, dense and deep. It has less of a yellow/brown tone in the later batches, making it a cross between deep brown and deep grey - perfect for winter! Pairing Lauscha Cocoa with pale pinks and blues is just blissful!

The rods come in a variety of diameters - I personally like the smaller rods, as they are easier to work with.  The color of the rods is often darker than when the glass has been melted - almost black in the latest batch.

Like most other Lauscha colors, Cocoa is a bit stiff to work with. It takes a bit longer to melt than other opaques, and cools pretty quickly.  I haven’t experienced any shockiness, though.  The later batches encase well with the clears and pale transparents I have used. The stiffness of this glass makes it particularly nice to use in stringer work and raised dots.

One thing you should know about this enigmatic color is the way it reacts with other colors.  First, it tends to envelop any other color that is layered over it.  This can create some stunning effects with pale opaque shades. Conversely, Cocoa will spread like wildfire on top of most other opaques and transparents, and leave ghostly reaction lines.

Cocoa is a striking color, and will actually get paler as you strike it.  It starts out a deep, glossy color.  Striking can be a bit tricky and it takes some time to learn the feel of it.

One last thing - remember - Cocoa isn’t edible, so don’t let anyone catch you licking it, as tempting as that may be.  And I speak from experience. 

 

Girl’s Day Out

So I had some serious cabin fever today.  Since I am doing a project for Step By Step Beads, and have a very limited amount of time to get some supplies, I decided to take a little trip to Shipwreck Beads.  I love living in Washington, because not only am I within driving distance of half a dozen glass manufacturers and dealers, I am also only a short 1 1/2 hours away from one of the largest bead stores ever. Shipwreck mostly does mail order and online sales, but they also have a storefront in Lacey.  Okay, make that a……warehouse. Because OMG……it’s huge!

I’d never been there before today, and let me just say this:  It’s a damn good thing they have a little deli/cafe thingie in the middle of the store, because I needed to keep my blood sugar up and myself caffeinated for this place. I’ve never seen a bead store this gigantic. I literally had issues with my eyes going wiggy after about 30 minutes in there. The sheer amount of color and sparkle will most likely cause Sensory!Overload! for anyone who is a creative soul.

As for selection - it’s pretty good, as you may imagine.  I mean, after all, did I mention the size of the building?  I was a little surprised by the total lack of selection of decent findings there - unfortunately.  Most of what they had was base metal, and what they did have of good metal was really generic. But the rest of the merchandise made up for that lack.

They have an amazing amount of Czech glass beads - it seemed like that pretty much took up half the store.  any size/color/finish you can imagine in Czech - it’s there.  I had to yank my eyes away from the gorgeous firepolished stuff after I picked out a couple things I needed.

Another quarter of the store seemed to be taken up by giant bins of bagged generic Indian glass beads - which was kind of off-putting for me.  I am a glass bead snob - I don’t apologize for it.  :D  Which brings us to the gi-normous aisle of Chinese lampwork beads….ahh well.  Didn’t see any artist-made lampwork, but I wasn’t expecting to, since they are a high-volume online and mail order seller mostly. I usually only see the handmade stuff in smaller bead stores. 

One nice thing is that they had a decent selection of both Swarovski and Preciosa brand crystal beads, in a bunch of different shapes and colors.  Two whole aisles of crystals - I spent a lot of time in that section. It literally caused me pain to have to leave that area without buying a whole lot more than I did. In a store like that, you need to stay on track or you’re sunk.  Hence the name.

I was desperate for more Bali/Thai sterling beads, but alas, there were almost none to be found there.  They did have some sterling, but it was mostly unidentifiable and pretty generic.  They did have a few nice toggle clasps, but they were really expensive. Most of the sterling was - but that’s no surprise in this economy.

As for gemstones - yep, they have em.  Hanging all over one of the walls and taking up a couple of aisles of their own.  I had to refrain, but they had some really great choices.  I drooled over all of them and had to walk away.  Sniff.  They also had a decent selection of books, stringing materials, bead storage and tools.

That’s all I can honestly remember, because it’s all becoming a blur of color now that I am home with my modest purchase of $33.77.  I am sure Shipwreck has way more than I have mentioned here…you’ll just have to take a trip there and check it out.  Try not to have a time limit or a….um….budget.

Crazy for Color - Odd Lots and More

Beadmakers. Have we all gone insane? When it comes to glass color, I would say - yep. We’re nuts. Dangle a newly-released rod color in front of us and we salivate. I think it all started when Effetre released their Handmade line back when I first started making beads, a little over five years ago. All of a sudden there were these new colors out - most of them opaque - that looked completely different than any other glass out there. At least to my newbie eyes they did.

Some rods were giant, some were teeny, some were even cone-shaped. And because they were all handpulled at the factory, instead of pulled by machines, we could see all the different batches and had fun picking our favorites.

We all drooled over the new Opaque Purple, which turned out to be a nightmare for some, earning it the name Evil Devitrifying Purple. Gorgeous, but eeeeeevil. I probably won’t have it reviewed here on Coloraddiction, because I am……EDP challenged. We got excited by Copper Green and the dark version of Teal transparent. We saw a bunch of new opaque pinks, some of which were….weird (Tongue, Powder). We marveled at the new violets and the Sage and Avocado greens. We wondered what the heck Effetre was thinking when they named their new dark pine green transparent “Dark Sage”.

At that same time, we also saw Effetre’s coolest mistake ever. The enigmatic and hard to find Streaky Pink. Effetre just thought they made a crappy batch of their Dark Pink 256 (or was it Light Pink 260?)….but no. That glass was seriously cool, at least in my opinion, and led to the Streaky Pink craze, where beadmakers were buying and selling this glass online for several hundred dollars a pound - sometimes even more. I admit to falling prey to its siren’s call over and over again. I even became known online as the Queen of Pink – and probably other, less attractive names – when I began showing all my pink beads to everyone. People thought I was crazy to pay what I did for an opaque pale pink shade. But what I did with it turned out to be quite nice – if I do say so myself.

I think it was that one glass color that brought on the Odd Lot insanity we see now in the glass market. Mistakes made by glass manufacturers are now called Odd Lots - and they have discovered that we beadmakers are defenseless against the temptation of buying every single Odd Lot out there. One glass company, Vetrofond, has pretty much become Odd Lot Central to us. They release a new Odd Lot practically every hour. And the colors are becoming more and more complex and dare I say….freaking cool. They started with Coral 420 (how many batches are there of that – 20 or so?) and worked their way through to some really interesting tri-color and organic shades.

To keep up with the insanity of us beadmakers, we have seen a surge of new glass companies starting up that specialize in their own new color formulas. Since I started in the lampwork field, I have seen Vetrofond start their Odd Lots, Double Helix (which specializes in handmade silver glass colors), Creation Is Messy (CIM), ASK 104 (a partnering of Arrow Springs and Kugler), Precision aka R4 (which was primarily a borosilicate maker, but is coming out with 104 coe silver glass) and more. All these makers create soft glass in the 104 range, and are adding new colors to their line all the time.

There’s just so much more out there, choosing glass is almost confusing, and a whole lot more exhilerating than it used to be. We beadmakers are eating it up. Just look at the bidding wars on ebay that happen when a rare color goes up for sale. We often stalk the smaller glass makers’ websites for brand new colors, and we buy them out of stock as soon as we possibly can. We bug the larger vendors on a constant basis about when we can expect whatever new color that has been previewed. They can barely keep up with our demand. Frantz Art Glass now has a newsletter dedicated almost completely to new colors. We’re just out of our minds. But we’re happy about it!