Mini Mo' Aug 2011 - Sedona Park and Parma Violets

This colourway is my favourite so far. Lashings of Effetre Ivory, silver leaf and beautiful striking shards made from lovely Coral/Orange Phoenix. The colour takes me back to a holiday, many moons ago, to Arizona and it brings to mind fond memories of an afternoon tooling about in Sedona National Park in a Pink Jeep!


This pressed vertebrae bead has been finished with a Sedona park silvered murrini on each side. I have left them a little raised to show how they look when used this way. I have a thing for making murrini with asymmetric starburst "spokes" at the minute and these take that idea about as far as I could push it to give them a softer and more organic appearance without them looking unstructured.

This pretty little bead set has been made on a base of Effetre mid Topaz and uses little pieces of Sedona Park twistie encased with 006 to magnify the detail. Several of the beads have Sedona Park murrini which have been melted in flush to the beads surface.

My second colourway this month puts me in mind of those little rolls of perfumed sweets that I used to love when I was little. It is called Parma Violet (or more truthfully and being queen of typo's Palma Violets). It's a lovely (slightly reactive in an oxygen rich flame) lavender, lilac and pale violet selection. The glass I have used here includes Lauscha Violet, ASK petal Pink and CiM Thai Orchid.

To the left is a vertebrae bead with a twist, the ribs have been made with a rod of pale lilac filligreano which has left a floating ribbon of colour wrapped around my bead. I have finished each side with raised Parma Violet murrini - these again have asymmetric "spokes" to give them an organic feel.

to the right are a set of beads created using long lengths of Parma Violets Twistie cane. I wrapped these in a low flame over a tube shaped base of CiM Thai Orchid or ASK Petal Pink and encased with a thick layer of Effetre 006.



This final bead set uses Midnight Whisper shards which are made with a new colour - CiM Midnight ltd run. You can read more about my Midnight  Messy Testing here.

Jolene x

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Midnight Chameloen..........

Midnight ltd run shards with pure silver

Midnight is a new addition to CiM's limited run selection and it's a bit of an enigma. In rod form it looks almost navy but when I held it up to the light it looked much more purpleish to me. I immediately wanted to play with this new glass as silvered shards. I tried some shards using midnight alone but found them to be too pale, generally I make transparent shards over a tiny base of a pale opaque to give them more depth, unless the glass is super dense like CiM Slytherin. For Midnight I wanted to emphasis the purple tones and so chose Heffalump to make a small core on the end of my blowpipe, layered on lashings of Midnight and then burnished fine silver leaf over the top. As you can see from the picture of my shards on the right, Midnight hasn't reacted with the silver leaf at all which is sitting in the surface of my shards in pretty little droplets.

I chose a number of different base glasses to pop my Midnight shards on top of. Starting at the top and looking clockwise - over the top of Zachary, Fremen, Blush and Gelly's Sty, these shards do indeed show purple tones. Over Desert Pink, Larkspur and Cranberry Pink, Midnight shards tend to look much more like a deep dark blue.

Midnight Whisper Beads

The amber colors that you can see coming through in Zachery, Fremen and Desert pink tell me that these base glasses have reacted to the fine silver droplets on my Midnight shards and that playing about with these and some silver rich glass would yield some interesting results.

Some cold worked and acid etched Midnight shard beads. These show that Midnight etches beautifully.

Jolene x

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Wonderweb - Unique Hades 511820-2

Unique Hades 511820-2 is an extremely dense black but has a different formula to regular Hades. It webs and spreads beautifully on the surface of a bead but also picks up wisps of silver in an oxygen rich flame in much the same way as CiM Gunmetal. It is much stiffer to work with than Gunmetal however and looks a true black when pulled thin as Hades does. In my opinion it displays the best properties of both of these two CiM blacks.

The silver/black webbing in this bead came from applying a stringer that was about 0.8mm across over my encasing layer of Effetre 006 clear and then simply melting it down flat in a fairly hot, slightly oxy rich flame.

Jolene x

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