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!

Vetrofond must love orange….

So Vetrofond, our favorite Odd Lot glass maker, has come out with yet another huge assortment of weird colors for us to try out.  This is what…the fifth batch?  I do applaud them for listening to their customers and for really trying to put out new and inventive glass for us. 

But enough with the orange filigrana, please!!  I mean, have you SEEN the latest batch of odds?  Almost all oranges and greens.  And ALL filigrana - a dark color covered in a contrasting lighter color, for a marbled look.

I say that with love and hope that Vetrofond will soon hear me and come out with some great new opaque purples and pinks.  Actual pinks.  Not faded out pale translucent pinks. Stellar purples. Not greyed out, reactive purples.

It’s true that Vetrofond is likely catering to those beadmakers who really love reactive glass - who adore making organic beads and messing with different metallic reactions.  I guess I am just one of those rare glass-lovers that love plain, pure, stable colors that I can combine and layer without reactions.

Don’t get me wrong - I do love reactions, sometimes.  But not with every color. 

We have enough of those now, I think.  Double Helix, Vetrofond, ASK, Lauscha and other makers are really pumping out the silver based, filigrana, reactive, organic and weird. It’s fun to experiment with them - to a point.

One other thing - if you’ve been buying all this new glass, you’ve probably realized by now that the paddle pics shown on the vendors web sites do not often relate to the real thing when you personally melt the glass.  I’ve still not been able to get that sweet marbly pink and cream from Sweet Strawberry. Just a rusty, tomato red. Pink #3 Pastel was nothing but almost white for me. Orange Punch never looked like the paddle pic - it stayed a translucent red, no matter what I did.  And the gorgeous Poppy?  Hard to turn pink, like the paddle - mostly a luscious…..yep, you guessed it……orange.  I am afraid to buy the brand new Jupiter - it looks so yummy in the paddle, but who knows if I will actually get that color for reals.

So…. Vetrofond?  Please?  A deep, vivid opaque purple. A bright opaque pink. A sweet opaque apricot or peach.  Pretty please.  And no more orange. For the love of GOD no more orange.

Rising Star: Vetrofond 942 Poppy (aka Watermelon) Odd

One of Vetrofond’s more recent Odd Lot selections, this color is….interesting. When I saw the picture of Poppy on Frantz Art Glass’s newsletter, I got excited. When I finally was able to order some, and saw the rod color for myself, my heart started pounding. Because - and I say this with the most maturity possible - OMG!!!! The rod color is just the most delicious shade of bright pinky-coral-glowy-juicy-watermelon imaginable.

If only the glass stayed that color when melted. **heartbreak**

Don’t get me wrong - this is still a lovely, cheerful color. But for the most part, it stays a bright coral orange, and loses a lot of its translucent pink quality. The color variances in this glass really depend on your ability to strike it. It’s VERY picky about temperature and timing.

This color reminds me a little bit of the first batch of ASK 104 Passionate Pink - back when that color first came out. Poppy shares that color’s way of responding to temperature.

The glass itself is somewhat stiff - and turns a weird sparkly grey in the flame. When you strike it, the surface can turn a murky orange brown - and that’s kind of what you’re looking for. The darker the bead when you put it into the kiln, the brighter orange you get when it comes out of the kiln. Most of the time. Did I mention this glass is really picky?

Encasing this color in any pale pink or clear transparent yields a pretty, pale creamsicle color. I love this, because you can’t get that pale of a color with most of your typical orange shades.

Poppy almost never comes out as a solid color after annealing. It usually has quite a few striations of color ranging from coral pink to sunshine orange on the same bead.

This is one of the only colors I have that I really wish would stay the same shade as the rod. Hopefully Vetrofond will figure out a way! But it’s still really lovely. Get some, especially if you love juicy summer colors.

 

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!