CIM Mink, CIM Maple, and Effetre Antique Green

What's not to love about a rich, dark honey amber mixed with pastel turquoise and green. These colours look great on everyone and go with pretty much everything.  I could make them over and over (and have made them quite a few times).

This set is made with three CIM colours.  The warm honey brown comes from CIM Maple and CIM Mink and the pastel green is CIM Sprout.  The lovely soft turquoise is Effetre Antique Green.  I'm not sure why it's called green because even though it is definitely a turquoise colour, I read it a little more blue than green but either way it's a beautiful colour.

A few comments on CIM Maple.  This is a very interesting glass.  It is a dark clear transparent amber in rod form but goes kind of milky or opalescent when melted.  It is very stiff but still very easy to work with and the final result goes back to a very transparent amber.

Also some nice silver line reactions between the Antique Green and Maple.  It's hard to see in the pictures but if you look closely at the green bead near the front in the first picture, you can just make out sparkly bits of silver around the blue dots.  Very pretty in person.

Transparent Purple Effetre Ink Blue and CIM Ink Blot

I'm in a bit of a transparent purple mood.  Something about very dark transparent colours layered with tons and tons of clear glass just seems to have a very clean, elegant look.  I'm also experimenting a little with sizes and shapes and working on my fine stringer.  Not as good as I'd like to be yet but not horrible either.  This set is made with Effetre Ink Blue which is the brighter purple and CIM Ink Blot which is the darker, slightly bluish purple.  Both are lovely glasses and very easy to work with.  

This set is made with Effetre Ink Blue transparent, Effetre Medium Yellow Green and CIM Dirty Martini.  The encased dot beads turned out pretty nice and the stringer designs need a little more work but aren't bad.  I've layered the transparent purple 2 or 3 times from the bottom of some of the beads to get a gradient effect which I really like ( you can see it much better on the left most bead in the below picture).

CIM Dirty Martini and Effetre Dark Grey

I love CIM Dirty Martini.  In fact, if I had to chose, I would say that it was my favourite glass colour.  I was worried for a little while that it might go out of production because Creation is Messy (CIM) was making a lot of similar greens in limited edition colours.  I assumed that they were trying to make Dirty Martini and not quite getting it but thankfully it is still a regular edition colour.  It is a pale, very grey toned green.  What I would call celadon and it goes fabulously with grey and white and pretty much any other colour you can name.

My camera didn't really like these colours, I guess because they're so neutral.  In person, the Dirty Martini is greener than showing in the pictures but other than whiting out the background, I've chosen to do very few adjustments to photos just to save time and frustration (the adjustments never seem to come out the way I want).

This set of beads is made with CIM Dirty Martini (surpise!), Effetre Dark Grey pastel, Effetre Dark Grey transparent, Vetrofond Crystal Green, and Effetre White.

Pretty in Pink and Orange CIM Tiger Lily and Effetre Light Pink Pastel

It is sooo cold here in Toronto.  I know it's winter but wow this is really really cold.  This set of beads was intended to help fight the winter blahs.  A gorgeous bright vivid orange from Creation is Messy called Tiger Lily.  This is a beautiful orange.  Not too red, not too blue, clean with no streaking and very easy to melt.  Love it.  It also plays really nicely with the other colours which include CIM Oyster Mushroom, Effetre Light Pink Pastel, Sage Green and Pale Blue transparent.

Well, that took longer than expected

I'm finally back to the torch and have a few new bead sets that I'll be listing tonight.  I'm not really sure how my 3 months away turned into more than 9 months of missing in action.  I just couldn't seem to work up the interest in going back to the torch which is a problem since I have tons and tons of glass that needs to be used up.  Hopefully, I'll be able to do a bit more regular work and even post to my blog (this here one) once in awhile.

One of the things I've decided to do is simplify as much as possible.  I'm only taking 3 pictures of each bead set and then the only adjustments that I'm making are to white out the background (grey dingy backgrounds just drive me nuts).  As per the above picture, I think it looks pretty nice and it lets the beads and their colours stand out a lot more. 

This set was made with Effetre Ivory, Sage Green, Sandstone, and Dark Brown trans and CIM Adamantium, Double Helix Khaos and TAG Fire Lotus.  Lots of rich earthy colours for a nice tribal effect with hints of silvery swirls.

I'm off to Etsy to list beads now and I'll be back soon to update on glasses and colours.

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.