Hades & Peace

I got a delivery of glass for testing from Creation Is Messy on Thursday and I've been playing about with all of the delicious glasses.  I'm going to be adding a couple of colour testing posts to the blog this weekend so do stay tuned.

One of the CiM glasses I've been experimenting with is Hades.  This is a really intense black.  Black glass is actually transparent and is normally really saturated purple or blue and when you pull that into fine stringers the black is no longer black.  Hades, like Effetre's Intense Black, doesn't do that.  It maintains its blackness even when pulled into freakishly fine stringer.

This isn't the first time I've tried Hades - I've used it before but this time I set time aside and really watched how it works.  I've found that you have to treat Hades really gently.  The beads at the top of this post are CiM Peace (white) with Hades polka dots.  You may be able to see that the polka dots are not totally flush with the base bead.  They're really nearly almost smooth but I was erring on the side of caution when it came to melting the dots in.  I've decided that if you work the Hades slowly in a cooler flame it will keep its crispness.  If I'd melted these dots in at my normal rate they would have feathered and bled at the edges creating a murky grey-brown halo to the dots.  So I went slowly which paid off and the result is crisp jet black on plain white.  Simple yet striking. 

There's more to discover and say about Hades but I will save that for a proper CiM testing post.