Whites

I ran some pretty simple comparison tests with all the CIM whites: Peace, Marshmallow and Cirrus against Effetre White 204.

In the interests of my Sunbaked beads, I'm always on the lookout for new glasses that don't react to a wrap of silver wire - sadly, I won't be adding any of the CIM whites to my Sunbaked palette.

(Incidentally the white I do use is

made by Plowden & Thompson.)

The next test I ran was to see how they reacted to Hades dots.

I tried out Peace and Hades together some time ago and now I remember discovering that they get this metallic shadow between them - you can see a similar thing is happening with the Effetre white, although less pronounced. Those dots on the Peace bead look quite big ... hmmm...

I really like how the Cirrus and Marshmallow are behaving themselves with nice small dots, just how I applied them!

Last summer I made myself a necklace from white beads decorated with Double Helix Triton hearts - I love the way the Triton fumes the Effetre white to an aged sepia shade.

So lets see how the CIM whites react to Triton.

I found that Cirrus tends to swallow other colours a little - the hearts in the first bead on the left were too small and weak, so I made another bead with bigger dots and these were much better. Marshmallow just got on with the job again, the photo is bad but the reaction was quite good! I'm finding that other colours tend to spread on Peace - my Hades dots looked big and the same happened with Triton, so I made a second bead with smaller dots and it worked better.

My last test was to see how these Whites etch. I made a simple plain bead from each glass and after annealing and cleaning, I soaked them in EtchAll fluid for a few minutes.

The only surprise here was with Cirrus - which resisted the etching fluid and came out shiny! The others all etched nicely.

So in conclusion I've discovered a couple of things: I've never tried Cirrus or Marshmallow before this but I will definitely be using Cirrus again, I love the "floating" look when other colours are added to it. Marshmallow is a well behaved opal, it doesn't appear to swallow or spread, it etches okay. Peace is a great alternative to Effetre White, as long as I remember that other colours tend to spread a little on it, so keep any decoration small and tight.

I went on to use Peace as a base for some other designs that I've been working on ... and I'm really pleased with the result, its great with silver foil melted in.

But more of that later!