A little bit of black glass goes a long way

Sooo, I was feeling a little uninspired and decided to go to one of my favourite sites: design-seeds.com.  After looking around, I decided to try and make a set of beads based on the above palette.  Why?  I'm not really sure.  I've been using a lot of green and yellow so I just think I was in the mood for something a little more neutral (plus the dog is adorable).  I chose 5 glass colours because I thought the first and last colour were pretty similar and I went with: CIM Butter Pecan Unique 5, CIM Chai Unique 3, CIM Eggplant, Effetre Black and CIM Lichen.  This is basically 4 very light to light colours with black.  I thought the set would be light and airy with small hints of black to add detail.  I sat down and made 13 beads and ended up with this.

Now keep in mind that these are very brightly lighted with studio lighting and come across a bit darker in real life.  As far as I was concerned these beads were too dark.  Not the light and airy concept I was shooting for, especially the beads in the back row.  So back to the drawing board or in this case the torch to make 7 more beads without any black glass at all.

Yes, this is more like it.  I kept the front row of beads which had just hints of black and added the new beads and got something much softer and lighter in tone.  They remind me of vintage French linens in soft cream, pale sage with hints of plum.  There was nothing really wrong with the first set of beads except they weren't the look I was trying to achieve.  Although when I look at them now, they actually do seem closer to the inspiration picture. Oh, well.  Here's the final set.

Bright, Spring-y slightly Easter-y

First off, I really didn't set out to make an "Easter" set of beads but I seem to have done it whether I meant to or not.  Second, I should really know better than to assume that the colour of a glass rod will have any resemblance to how that glass looks when it's melted.  And third, opal glass doesn't really etch all that well.

These colours looked different enough in rod form to make me think I was creating more of a "batik" style of bead.  They all melted a little brighter than I expected and changed my batik to an Easter especially the orange colour.  This is CIM Creamsicle Unique 2 and in rod form it looks like a slightly orangey yellow.  Once melted, it became a slightly yellowy orange which might not seem like a big shift but really changed the look of these beads.

This lovely pink colour is Reichenbach Opal Raspberry.  This colour changes a bit depending on your light source.  It looks much bluer in natural light and much oranger in indoor lighting.  This makes it somewhat hard to photograph since studio lights are very very bright incandescent lights which give this pink a very warm hue.  The good thing is that it's a lovely colour either way so you can go too far wrong.

As for the rest of the colours, we have CIM African Gray (a warm, almost chocolate gray), CIM Elphaba (a medium tone, neutral green), and Effetre Sky Blue.