CiM Testing: Goji

Goji is the perfect name for this colour. It’s a goji berry orange-red that is not transparent enough to call transparent but also not fully opaque.

I didn’t strike the glass as such; I just made beads with it in my usual way so if there was any striking it would have happened while I was rounding up the beads and adding the spots.

These beads have a core of CiM Creamsicle encased with a thin layer of Goji. There are slight colour variations towards the holes where I moved the glass with a brass tool, and this normally occurs with reds, oranges and yellows, but they barely show. 

The glass was smooth to work with and it didn’t shock or bubble.

The spots on the beads are CiM Quetzal and the spacers are CiM Peacock Feather.

The beads were photographed outdoors on an overcast day.

CiM Testing: Pizzazz

I’d been trying to save this one because it’s purple and purple is my favourite colour and for some reason I’d decided I had to keep it until last as some kind of treat but then my friend Jelveh asked me if I’d tested it yet and so I caved. 

Pizzazz was an attempt to recreate Jacaranda which was a transparent purple that had a hint of mistiness about it. Pizzazz is mistier than Jacaranda.

I’ve gone around the house with the beads trying them under different lights to see if the glass shifts colour to a more blue tone but most lights we have are LED and they don’t induce the same colour shift thing as older style lighting and fluorescent lights do so I can’t give a definitive answer on that one.

The glass itself was fine to work with. No shocking or bubbling.

For these beads I used the Pizzazz as a thin encasing layer over a core of CiM Heffalump. Because of the slightly foggy quality of the Pizzazz I thought I would get some sort of stringer reaction happening so I opted for Effetre Light Turquoise 232 stringer to test this and NO! No dark reaction lines or feathering. I really heated the scroll bead seeing if I could get a reaction line (a darker line running through the centre of the applied stringer) to happen but nope, it stayed crisp and clean. Interesting.

The purple spacers here are plain Pizzazz.

The beads were photographed outdoors in between rain showers on this frankly miserably-weathered Saturday.

CiM Testing: Aquamarine Ice Milky & Misty

These icy blue opals are a re-engineering of CiM Poseidon. The photo above shows Aquamarine Ice Milky on the left and Aquamarine Ice Misty on the right. As the names suggest, both are translucent but the misty version is a bit  more transparent.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

Aquamarine Ice is a really lovely shade of blue and for for the milky version I encased it with a thin layer of Effetre 006 Super Clear and applied spots of Effetre White 204. The spacers are plain Aquamarine Ice Milky.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

I hardly ever encase the CiM opals and I don’t know why. I think it must stem from my beginner beadmaking days (before CiM was a thing) and it was an absolute no-no to consider encasing any of the Italian opalino and alabastro glass because it would crack, so I think I got it into my head that it would be the same with the CiM opals. However, on the few occasions that I have encased the CiM opals I’ve not had any troubles.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

This round of testing I decided that I was going to use the misty and milky opals for my more usual type of beads instead of plain hearts or un-encased rounds. I’ve added the thin layer of clear as a barrier so that any decoration stays neat and clean because the opals have a tendency to make stringer and spots feathery and wibbly. That’s fine because you can use it to your advantage, like I do for my ‘batik’ style beads, but more often than not I like my dots and lines to be as crisp as a Krisproll.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

When testing the Aquamarine Ice Misty I thought I’d put some beads with white spots in the kiln – as a sort of sister set to the Aquamarine Ice Milky ones – but no. Obviously some knobhead (that’s me) picked up a stringer of CiM Birchwood halfway through making them so some of the beads have white spots and some have ivory ones, and now I’ve ended up with two trios instead of the intended set.

Aquamarine Ice Misty, encased in clear, in the sunshine

Aquamarine Ice is a proper blue sky blue and when the sun shines through the misty version of it it’s very swimming pool on a summer’s day.

I didn’t find either version of this glass at all shocky and it wasn’t bubbly or scummy. Really fab.

Aquamarine Ice Misty encased in clear, with ivory spots

Both versions are lovely but Aquamarine Ice Misty is definitely going on my glass shopping list. Hopefully I’ll be able to nab some.

All photographs were taken outdoors in the shade unless otherwise stated.

CiM Testing: Douglas Aster

Douglas Aster may sound like a character from an Agatha Christie novel but it’s actually a little daisy-like flower that has pale purple petals.

Creation is Messy’s Douglas Aster is a very pretty opaque pale purple that has a tiny hint of translucency to it. Only a bit – enough that when you pull it into stringer it’s not quite fully opaque.

It melted with no troubles and for these beads I encased it with a thin layer of Effetre Super Clear 006 and added spots of CiM Lapis. The spacers are just plain Douglas Aster and Lapis.

The beads were photographed outdoors in daylight.

Non-bead gubbins

Where the heck is time draining away to? I cannot believe how fast the last year and a bit has whooshed by. How can doing nothing, going nowhere and seeing nobody eat time at such an alarming rate? It feels like about three days since my last non-bead post but that one was at the end of March. Crazy.

Anyway, again, not much to report. I had a trip into the city centre for an eye test a couple of weeks ago. I'd not been there since the beginning of March last year when I did the Cambridge half marathon. That event started and finished on Midsummer Common which is home to the Camcattle cows at this time of year so I stopped by to say hello to the beautiful creatures before my eye appointment.

They are Red Poll cows and they are so calm and happy munching away as people go about their business on and by the common. Here's an article about the cows from a couple of years ago.

There follows a random photo of one of my favourite Cambridge post boxes which I walked past on the way to the optician.

We have quite a few Victorian post boxes in the city and I love that they're still in use after all these years. I think I was just excited to be not in the shed and out and about and I was like "Oooh, cows! Post boxes! The Hot Sausage vendor! Greggs!" and had to take some photos to mark the moment.

My eye test was meh. I've had glasses for short sightedness for a couple of years now and I only had to wear them when I needed to; for televison watching, the cinema (remember the cinema?) and basically whenever I wanted to properly see anything further than four feet away. The optician said I've got the same problem that watchmakers have in that with the beadmaking I've spent so many years looking at stuff a few inches from my face, my distance vision has suffered. My right eye is particularly bad and I was quite alarmed when I couldn't read the top row of the eye chart with it. It's got much worse since my last eye test so I have new glasses that I have to wear all the time now, so that's taking a bit of getting used to. My up-close vision is crazy good and the new prescription enables me to wear my glasses without them interfering with detailed work, reading and the like. This means I now have to wear prescription specs for making beads so it was goodbye to my didymium glasses and hello to some polycarbonate purple clip-on and flip-up jobs that make me feel like I have the eyes of Johnny 5.

I'm sure I'll get used to the new flameworking face furniture shortly but in the meantime don't be expecting any kind of complex beads because my eyes are still in the process of reprogramming my brain as to where the flame actually is.

In crochet news...

I finished my Rainbow Sampler Blanket on Saturday! 

I got the blanket all washed and dried the same day and let me tell you it's a flipping delight to cosy under in the evenings.

I enjoyed crocheting every single row of this blanket, even the ones I had to frog and redo whenever I muffed up.

So many stitches...

...so many rows

The blanket is H U G E. It's just under two metres square so it's about the same size as a double duvet.

Thanks to Kirsten of Haak Maar Raak for such a brilliantly-written, clear and highly enjoyable pattern.

So what's next on the crochet front? Well, I'm working my way through a marvellous book called Granny Square Flair by Shelley Husband of Spincushions. I also have Shelley's Siren's Atlas book and I have learnt so much from both of these books - false stitches, standing stitches and other ingenious ways to create seamless-looking crochet. So yep, I'm making every square from Granny Square Flair at the moment and no doubt they'll become yet another blanket. I have fifteen squares done. The latest five are currently wet blocking but here are the first ten I made.

I'm using Rico Creative Cotton DK in the shade Natural. These squares are 150mm and I'm loving all the different patterns and textures. I'm also really enjoying the single colour thing, mainly because the crochet becomes all about the stitches and the pattern instead of colour, but also because there are way fewer ends to weave in!

I started a concurrent crochet project last night (I always like to have two yarn things on the go at once so I can switch between them) and this one is a way to use up some of the massive amount of spare yarn I have left over from the Rainbow Sampler blanket. The pattern I've gone for is the Flowers in the Snow blanket from the Solstrikke blog. Yes, it's another blanket but I adore the challenge of a blanket. There's just something about them. My family had better prepare themselves for blanket gifts because I already have enough of the things here. I'm very much a process crocheter; I like the finished item but I love the process of making of it.

But yes, I started making a bunch of motifs from my leftover Scheepjes Colour Crafter last night. I've put all the yarn in a box and I do a lucky dip of three colours and then make a motif with whichever trio I've picked. This way I'm not overthinking it and I've been pleasantly surprised with a couple of the resulting combinations. They give me bead colour ideas.

Alas, each one of these motifs has six ends to weave in and then there will be two more ends per motif when it comes to the joining part of the process so what I'm lacking in ends weavery on the Granny Square Flair squares I'm more than making up for here.

Right, I think that's way more than enough chatter from me. I need to get my arse down the shed, don my Johnny 5s and make some beads. Have a good day!