CiM Testing: Lingonberry

Lingonberry is a transparent, utterly gorgeous cranberry pink.

When I test CiM glass I tend to avoid reading other testers’ posts (don’t hate me for this, other testers – it’s nothing personal) until I’ve used that colour myself, so I’m not influenced by what others have done or discovered. After I’ve used a new Creation is Messy colour and I’m writing up my findings on my blog, I go and fetch the link for the colour on the CiM website and I have a read of how other testers found the glass. Pretty much every tester mentions that Lingonberry has a ‘butterscotch cast’ or that it yellows in certain lights. I didn’t find this at all. I notice that Alexis Berger used Lingonberry to make a glass flower on her Hot Head torch and she didn’t get the butterscotch/yellowing either which makes me think it could be a working temperature thing? I work slow and cool (not the Fonzie kind of cool) so maybe that’s a reason for no yellowing?

Now, on to the unfun part of my findings… . I made six beads with Lingonberry. All of them were CiM Foam encased with a thin layer of Lingonberry. (The polka dots are Reichenbach 104 Deep Black if you’re interested.) As I was cleaning the beads three of them cracked. The other three are okay at the moment but that doesn’t mean they won’t develop fractures further down the line. We shall see.

The cracks are compatibility ones as opposed to thermal ones. The photo below shows the fractures.

Obviously this only means that I found that Lingonberry has compatibility issues with Foam. It doesn’t even mean that others couldn’t combine those two glasses and create stable beads. As I always say, there are so many factors and variables involved in beadmaking – torch, working style, technique, what phase the moon is in etc – and two beadmakers can use the same two glasses but get entirely different results. So yeah, I got cracked beads but that doesn’t mean you will; I’m just telling you what I found.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.