CIM color Testing: Monarch and Harvest

I am so excited to be testing the new CIM colors.  I will be reviewing Harvest and Monarch together.  Both are a beautiful shades of orange,  neither bubbled or scummed.

Monarch is a orange that is more on the yellow side,  slightly more orange than Pumpkin.   Harvest is a bit brighter than Alley Cat  but not as bright as Creamsicle.

Monarch is actually really really close to the color of a real Monarch

CIM color testing: Spooky

The first glass I am going to review is Spook,  it is a beautiful opal white.  It is more opaque than Cirrus and a little more transparent than Marshmallow.  It did not shock or bubble and melted like butter.  This glass was intended to be an opal amber but came out white.  It did not have much of a reaction to Effertre Turquoise or CIM Cranberry.  I paired it with a reduction silver glass blend and it did fume to a lovely amber shade. 

As you can see from this comparison picture Spooky is very simmilar to Marshmallow but slightly more translucent.  Marble became opaque with striations of translucency, its very pretty.

This is the Spooky with Khaos reduced and encased, Spooky fumed to a beautiful gold, as you can see Frozen did not fume at all.

The rubino frit did react it formed black lines
You can faintly see that the Effetre Light Turquoise di faintly react with the Spooky,  this is a better picture of how the Spooky fumed when paired with silver glass.  It also looks amazing when used to encase a transparent.  Spooky also etches well.

Tool Review Perlenpresse b501g

Review of the Perlenpresse Tool for thin glass shapes pattern 1 (b501g)

This tool has a  custom alteration to have the wire come out of the top of the heart.  Hello for my first post I wanted to review one of my many, many tools.  This is a headpin tool designed to make glass shape on the end of a wire, I use 20g copper wire.  The trick with this tool is not to try to add all the glass on at once.

This is a custom version of Perlenpresse's tool b501g

This is a sample of headpins I made using this tool.

 For the flowers I make a small ball and center it in the middle of the flower shape

here is the ball it's about 7mm around

after the first press,  I then add small dots where the petals go

 sometime the small dots fuse together too much and seperate them with a scalpel

 You can see that sometimes the dots get a little crooked,
That can be corrected in the pressing phase.

Here is the headpin after pressing,  sometimes it gets a little stuck in the cavity and you need to wiggle it to get it out.  There is room to add a bit more glass on the top 2 petals in the photo.  Just a tiny 1mm dot should do it, then repress.

I added some dots to the center for decoration.   Give it some good insurance heat and pop it in the kiln.

















Here is just a visual guide to using the heart cavity

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions!


In response to the comment, I use hemostats to hold the wire,  rather than rotating as you would with a pin vice or mandrel I just turn it back and forth heating the back side then the front.  The hemostats release easily.  I have a hard time removing the wire from the pin vice I have.