'Ozmopolitan'

Well, Fiona was right.  I knew midway through the first act of Wicked that I was going to have to make some very green beads.

After faffing about with various shades of green I chose CiM Oz (appropriate) and encased it thickly with Effetre Olive.  This has given such a vibrant green!

These will be for sale on my site at 8.00pm on Wednesday night.

CiM Testing : Dirty Martini

I'm not a big drinker, in fact I hardly ever drink alcohol at all so when Creation Is Messy introduced Dirty Martini to their palette I had to have a Google to find out what makes a martini dirty. Turns out it's the addition of olive juice or brine to the normal gin and vermouth mix.

But CiM's Dirty Martini is alcohol free - it is a very pale green glass with just a hint of grey about it. Since it's been available it has been one of my favourite glasses as it is just so well behaved! It is a clean, crisp colour with a slightly stiffer consistency to it which makes it superb for encasing with transparent glasses as it holds its shape and doesn't drag about the place. The 'Apple & Blueberry' beads pictured below are Dirty Martini encased thinly with CiM Mojito - a proper cocktail of glass!

I've heard some people say that they think Dirty Martini is a little too grey. On its own it does tend to look a bit pale but all you need to do to 'lift' it is to add stronger greens to the mix and I promise that this will make the Dirty Martini sing - the pale green beads in the 'Springtime' set below are a good example of this :

I'm always on the hunt for new colours to use for my fine stringerwork. I actually have quite a limited palette when it comes to that because only a handful of glasses behave exactly as I need them to. I am super-pleased to discover that I can add Dirty Martini to my Perfect For Stringer List. The beads below have a core of CiM Oz encased in Mojito and the stringer is Dirty Martini. You can see that it keeps its definition, doesn't bleed or spread and it also yields that wonderful reaction line - the slightly darker line you can see running through the centre of the stringer on the scrollwork bead :

So all in all I would say that Dirty Martini is a must-have colour. It's unlike any other shade in the 104 palette and it is absolutely wonderful to work with.