Glass Testing: CiM 630 Your Majesty, 628 Wisteria and 488 Peppermint Cream

Okay, everyone - I know it's been like 7 billion years since I have last posted a glass test, but here I am! Creation is Messy sent out a really large batch of new colors this time, too.

First off, not all the colors in the package are completely new; CiM has remade or reformulated a bunch of colors, and created two new sub-sections of glass they are calling Misty Opals and Sparkles. Misty Opals are a bit like the old Moonstone shades, in that they are somewhat more translucent than regular Opals. The Sparkles are transparent colors mixed with goldstone. I'll get to those in a later post.

Now, I personally do not have a ton of experience with opals in general, so my testing of these (and there are a lot of them) will be somewhat limited to my own skill-set and style. I may not test every one - mostly because there are, like, 8 different shades of green opal, and I imagine they are all pretty similar. But I will try to get to as many was I can.

Almost all of the colors sent with this batch are Limited Runs, so assume the colors are not part of their main color line unless otherwise indicated. This is because CiM is not certain they can remake a lot of their new colors, and when they try to remake a color that doesn't have an established recipe and production, it's often just different enough to warrant its own name and number.

For this first session, I tested three colors - one opaque, one transparent and one of the Misty Opals.

The opaque is an off-white shade with just the teeniest hint of a greenish cast, and it's called Peppermint Cream. One major thing to begin with is that the rods of this color I was given were extremely shocky. Now, I am not sure if this is just a problem with these first rods, or if they have a whole batch like that. But I ended up wasting a lot of what I had just trying to get a flame environment right enough to melt a few gathers and pull stringers. I ended up having to heat the ends of the rods in the kiln for a bit before melting. The shockiness returned after the rod cooled, so I had to do this several times. This frustrates me to no end! These days, pale opaque rods are more often than not really shocky. Hopefully they can fix this, because if it can't be fixed, I won't be buying this color, even though it is very pretty. I have let Kathy of CiM know about this and hope for a response soon.

Beyond the shockiness, Peppermint Cream is a nice, opaque neutral color that I mostly just used as a base. I wasn't able to encase it for stringer because the rod kept shattering, but I was able to make some spacers and a couple of beads with it. Once it is hot, it has a nice consistency and stays opaque. I did notice some specks of what might be dirt or something in the petal I pulled, which may account for the shocky nature. You can see this if you look closely at the picture above.

I don't have much else to say about Peppermint Cream - but if they end up reformulating it to remove the fragility, I will gladly test it again. I'd like to have this shade in my arsenal - it's nice to have a cooler off-white color as a base.

Next, we have Your Majesty, a medium transparent plum/purple. It seems to be a lighter version of Simply Berry, CiM's dark amethyst shade. I would say that even though Your Majesty has less of a brownish cast than its Effetre cousins, it is still much more plum than purple. I do like that it's not too dark - this will make it a nice color to layer with light purple and blue opaques.

In the beads below, I layered it on top of Evil Queen, and it worked nicely. I can't say this is the most exciting purple in the world, but it's better than some of the alternatives. I would love it if CiM could recreate the Simply Berry Unique one-off that was similar to this, but much less plum and more orchid in color.

Your Majesty was a tiny bit stiffer than usual, but not enough to keep it from layering well. It didn't have any reactive properties, and didn't spread, bleed or scum. It's got great clarity as well. 

Last, we have Wisteria, a Misty Opaque that is a remake of Crocus that is supposed to have more translucency after annealing. I would say it does succeed in that regard, lending an almost pinkish cast to the glowy lavender shade that is Crocus, because more light is getting though.

This glass was not too stiff, and melted nicely. I was able to use it as encased stringer - I layered it on top of Rapunzel (CiM's opaque pale lavender) and pulled a stringer that worked well for scrolling. It held up well when used that way - which is a nice change from the usually persnickety opals, which tended to pop off and crack when used as encased stringer for scrollwork.

In the beads below, I used it as my transparent when layering, and Rapunzel as the opaque. As you can see, these lighter purples faded into the background behind the darker plum. It's just visible enough to lighten the plum dots and ads a little dimension. I think Misty Opals would probably be better used as a base, or as raised decoration, rather than as layered dots.

Wisteria, like almost every other lavender glass on the planet, is a color shifter; it goes bluer under fluorescent lighting, and fades out under some of the new energy efficient bulbs. Under my Reveal bulbs, it stays true glowy lavender with a pinkish cast.

Again, I don't tend to work with opals, so I don't have a lot more to say, except it is very pretty!  Here are a couple of beads with all three colors (along with Evil Queen and clear).

I have not included links to colors in this post because they are not up on CiM's website yet. When they go up, I will edit them in. More colors to come soon!

Glass Testing: CiM 555 Sacre Bleu Ltd. Run

Hey, everyone! Today's new color test is of Creation is Messy's latest blue - a transparent bright cobalt called Sacre Bleu. This vivid shade is actually a very easy glass to work with, if a bit tough to capture in a picture. It's very intense - even more so than Effetre Intense Blue or CiM's other cobalt blues called Neon Blue and Royal.

Sacre Bleu is probably closest to Royal, in my opinion, but if you put all four rod colors together, you might have a hard time telling the difference. It's a bit lighter and less intense than Effetre's long-standing basic Cobalt glass.

Sacre Bleu was very easy to use - only slightly stiff, but melts smoothly and evenly. It layers extremely well, with no feathering, bleeding, spreading, pitting, etc. I also didn't have any problems with the rods shocking.

I had fun layering this gorgeous blue on top of Effetre Periwinkle, thus lightening it up a bit while keeping the lovely saturation of color. Layering was easy, since Periwinkle is not as stiff as it's CiM counterpart Grumpy Bear. But you can probably use that in place of Periwinkle and not see much difference.

Sacre Bleu is an easy glass to use and love, but it is a bit hard to photograph. Like all cobalt shades, this one shows up lighter and less intense in pictures, and it takes some photo-editing to get it even close to the vivid deep shade of blue it is in real life. This is as close as I could get!

Here's a set of big hole beads I made with these colors, paired up with some saturated purples for an intense, summery effect. 

These beads are now available in my newly re-opened Etsy store!

Glass Testing: CiM 912 Lilac and 557 Serenity

Happy weekend, everyone! Next on the docket we have two new CiM colors that I really loved.

First up is Lilac, a pale opaque lavender-pink. When I saw these rods I have to admit I wasn't all that impressed. After all, we have lots and lots of too-pale pinks and lavenders in the color palette, and one more wasn't going to do much for me. This is for two reasons - one is that most of these pale colors are just too pale for me when worked alone - especially when you don't layer them. Second is that the majority of the really pale pinks and lavenders are not as opaque as I need them to be - they're opalescent, which makes them hard to layer because they don't keep what little color they do have.

If it sounds like I'm picky - well, I am. Pinks and purples are tough cookies in the glass world!

Lilac is very, very pale - almost icy - and not really pink or lavender, but somewhere in between. However, it makes up for those things by being quite opaque and just a dream to melt. It's not as stiff as more opal glass, and doesn't lost it's opacity when layered. That means you can put darker transparent colors over it and it won't wash out or go see-through. When encasing it in clear, it does go lighter, as you might expect.

So for me, Lilac is a perfect color to layer with things like Rubino, Double Helix Rhea (as seen here), transparent Dark Violet and other saturated pinks and purples. Lilac holds its cool, icy tone well, shifting the reddish fuchsia in the Rhea to a colder hot pink fuchsia - perfect!

Lilac melts really nicely - I didn't have any shocking, which is a relief, since lots of glass seems shocky these days. There also wasn't any pitting or spreading or bleeding - just nice, smooth, opaque, pale color. The viscosity is pretty nice - not too soupy or too stiff.

Tiny little purple striations appeared in the pulled sampler of this color, but no striations appeared in the spacers or in the beads where the color is left bare. I imagine that using this color for sculptural work will lead to some striations.

(Below: Lilac is covered in Rhea on these beads - you can see that it holds its opacity well, even in the encased stringer.)

Next we have Serenity - a medium transparent teal. Now, CiM has done a lot of batches of transparent glass in the blue-green spectrum. Like, a lot. But I'm not mad at that. I love the variety of color. This particular shade sits right in the middle - it's bluer than both Aegean and Poolside, and greener than Zoe, Pulsar, Blue-yah! and Birthstone. It's medium in saturation, making it a lovely color to layer - my favorite thing to do!

There's not much to say about the workability of Serenity - I experienced no bubbles or scum (a nice departure from most transparent blues and greens), no shocking, no spreading or bleeding and no pitting. It's not too stiff, and doesn't seem to react to much - it's just your basic, easy glass.

In these beads, I layered it on top of Fremen, which is a light sky blue. I thought the outcome would be lighter, but I was pleasantly surprised at the lovely, vibrant shade of turquoise-teal that I got.

Serenity fits right into its own spot in the kind of crowded palette of blue-greens, but for me - the more the merrier, because I adore these colors!

**One note on the photography - the lighter the color, the tougher it was to photograph, and Lilac was one of those colors that my camera just hated.  Also, Serenity appears slightly washed out to me on camera - but all blue-greens do to me. They never, ever look the same in real life as they do on the screen - even in anyone else's pics. What I see is always more brilliant and multi-dimensional in real life than in a picture. My husband and I both think I can see these colors differently than other people, so I try to get the pics to be as close to what I think everyone else sees as I can. It's possible that I am a tetrachromat, but who really knows. Please do let me know if my pics ever seem way off - thanks!

(Below: Serenity is layered over Fremen, yielding a gorgeous turquoise)

More to come!

Glass Testing: CiM 626 Enchanted and 627 Rapunzel - Plus a Comparison of Lavender Color Shifts!

Next in line for new CiM color tests are two shades of lavender called Enchanted and Rapunzel. Plus, since there are so many shades of lavender glass out these days, I decided to do a couple of comparison shots of the ones I happen to have on hand. Most of these are CiM, with a couple of Effetre thrown in for kicks. This is mostly just to show differences in color shifting, since they all have similar properties. More on that later. First, the newbies!


Rapunzel is the opaque lavender - CiM created this to be an opaque version of their color Crocus, an opal lavender.

Rapunzel is a sweet shade that is just a little bit more pink and a touch brighter than the other opaque lavender CiM has called Heffalump. I would also say that Rapunzel is a touch more dense - meaning it's more opaque and tends to hold it's color without going as "ghostly" as the Heffalump does. We're not approaching the translucence of an opal color yet, but any lavender I have ever worked with is less dense than, say, the chalkiness of the pale opaque greens like Dirty Martini. However, Rapunzel is the densest of any opaque lavender I have worked with.  That makes it really wonderful for layering with transparent purples and pinks!

Left to right - Crocus, Effetre Lavender, Rapunzel

Plain, encased in clear and Enchanted

The consistency of this glass when melting is really nice. No pitting, shocking, or scumming. It also encases quite well without too much bleeding or feathering - and keeps its color under encasing pretty well.

I did notice that when you put a metallic glass on top of Rapunzel and reduce, the lavender reduces a little as well, and you can see a hint of pinkish-greyish haze on the lavender in some places. You can see this in some of the beads below.

Like other lavender shades, Rapunzel will color shift under different kinds of light. Instead of going more bluish like Heffalump and Effetre Lavender, Rapunzel actually washes out a little more on the pink side. In sunlight, the lavender is more pronounced.

I am really happy CiM came out with a more dense lavender - I'll be buying a bunch of this when it comes out - hopefully it's not too terribly expensive!


Next we have the transparent lavender shade Enchanted - another in a long line of very similar shades of lavender! I think for the most part that CiM tries melting the same lavender over and over, and they just get varied levels of saturation and color shifting properties, so they have to use different names for all the variations. That's cool with me - I love every one of them!

For the most part, Enchanted behaves very similarly when melted as its counterparts. A nice viscosity, not much in the way of scumming or bubbling, no shocking, and layers very well.  Not too stiff, either, which is very nice!

Enchanted sits pretty much in the middle when it comes to saturation. Here's a pic of the lavenders I have on hand, under reveal bulbs that show true color. (Some of these are discontinued colors, fyi.)You can see that Enchanted is about the same saturation as the colors around it, but just a tiny touch pinker.

When it comes to color shifting, there are some differences. Enchanted stays on the purplish side when under fluorescent bulbs. You can see in this pic here (kind of crude but it does the trick) that several of the shades shift to a pale blue while others stay lavender-ish but kind of wash out. This is where you might want to consider what colors you are pairing the lavender with to decide whether you want a blue color shift or not. When in sunlight however, the vivid lavender comes out to play.

Here are some beads I made with Enchanted and Rapunzel, along with Dark Violet, Koala and Mockingbird.

Glass Color Testing: CiM 624 African Violet Ltd. Run

It's been a good long time since CiM has released a darker transparent purple that wasn't on the red side - this is really exciting for me, since I am a purple freak! CiM's new African Violet is a lovely shade of soft purple that is very much on the blue side - an indigo for sure.

plain spacers

At first glance, the rods are pretty dark - like looking at purple in the middle of the night. Not nearly as dark as Gypsy or the new Cleopatra, but dark enough. When melted, though, African Violet loses some of its saturation and turns a little bit greyish. It's still purple enough, though.

For my purposes, I like a brighter purple, so I tried layering this on Heffalump, and the results are perfect.

African Violet is similar to Effetre Ink Blue in hue, but not quite as saturated.

left - encased in clear, right - layered over Heffalump, then encased in clear.

layered over white

The glass itself is pretty dreamy to work with - it's not too stiff and has no issues with scumming or bubbling. I also didn't have any problems with shocking. African Violet stays put without bleeding or sinking, and layers really well.  Encasing thins out the color a little bit, but not too much.

Below are some bead sets I made with the Heffalump/African Violet, along with Leaky Pen and Laguna. 

This purple is one of the easiest and prettiest glass colors I have used in awhile. Luckily, all the new CiM colors have been released and are available to buy over at Frantz. And the prices aren't too bad!