Serena's Bead Blog

Mojito is a color all on its own. Here you see it up next to effetre light brown and transparent olive. It is light and delicate, but I do believe there is no other color quite like it.

http://www.creationismessy.com/color.aspx?id=67

What is Maple? It is one of the newer CIM colors that I am quite thrilled with. Originally, I was comparing it to effetre medium or dark amber, but while pulling out all my samples I was rather excited to discover that it is much closer to Czech Smoke Topaz. From top right going clockwise, we have dark amber, dark smoke topaz, maple, light smoke topaz, and medium amber. As you can see, it falls right in between the light and dark smoke although I do believe my latest batch of dark smoke is not quite as dark as these beads. Either way, I think this is a fabulous shade of brown and can't wait to get more than one rod to play with.
Read more about this color on the creation is messy website.

So what do you do with a bored 6 year old who isn't allowed to watch TV and is super excited for an impending road trip? You have them help you photograph new beads! All the pictures here were taken by Elijah today. Honestly, I expected them all to be blurry and be horribly off-centered. But as you can see that's not the case. He did a fantastic job capturing the denim blue matte, super sterling blue, commando green, adamantium and carnival disks and dots set!

Its not year 2022 yet, but here I present you with Soylent. Just, please don't try and eat this one. So, not much to say about this one that you can't really see, but I will still elaborate a bit. Very streaky and dark green. Yaaaa, a good dark opaque green is very useful. This is one I would love to compare with effetre grass green and vetrofond grass green. (Although not all my batches of the vetro grass green have been this dark.) At this point, I am going to assume that this one will fall in between those two opaque grass greens and that it also will not play nice as a base bead with lots of other colors on top. I expect it will drown out other colors, but is still worth tyring, don't you think? Maybe you'll get to see some pictures of these together with other greens later.


http://www.creationismessy.com/color.aspx?id=64

Ta-da! They are done. After a very slow start to my day that had nothing to do with Dance Revolution and more to do with boring sit-n-wait visits to the doctor (for Tia's eye allergies), I thought I wouldn't get it finished. After an enormous rainstorm, but before it was too dark I found a quiet moment to photograph the new beauties. If you wander over to my color gallery you can get a little sneak peak at all 11 new colors. Five of them are already released, but I didn't have them in the color chart yet. The 6 new colors are all fabulous and I think most are going to be nice additions to the soft glass palette. I am real curious how close some of these colors are to the already available choices and hope to snap some quick pictures to compare. But for now I am going to talk about most of them one at time a bit here so that you might now a bit more than just glance at a little picture. I think these will all be available next week, but I might be wrong about that.
The one shown above is Gunmetal. As you can see it developed a nice metallic finish and most resembles metallic black in the effetre line. The 2nd bead from the left was the first one I made and honestly it had the best appearance after a trip through the kiln. I tried hard to replicate that, but could not get it just so. The others did get shiny and strealy at the same time. Very interesting. BUT I was a tad nervous while fiddling with them in the heat because the rod was extremely shocky. It took more than half of the rod I have just to make these 4 beads! They also did not etch very well - they came out all blotchy, but then why would anyone want to remove that gorgeous metallic finish with acid anyhow. So, hopefully not all the glass is as shocky as the one rod I have and that its not as costly as metallic black. Can't wait to see what I did to that one bead to make it shine so nicely.

http://www.creationismessy.com/color.aspx?id=70

I didn't get to play with the new colors yet. So all you get for now is this photo of the new CIM colors in rod form. Kind of a slacker, I am. But, in my defense I got sidetracked by the Dance Revolution 2 for the Wii that came in the mail today. We had alot of fun and it made me lose all track of my day. Oh well, maybe I can still get it done tonight.

I love getting stuff in the mail, especially packages I wasn't even expecting. Friday I got a package in the mail that Elijah swore was filled with air. It was a larger priority mail box that was extremely light for its size. It came from Kathy over at Creation is Messy. She sent me a bunch of the newer colors - some that have been released already (like commando and phoenix and such) but also some that haven't been. Oh I am so tickled. I get to play with Split Pea, Maple, Mojito, Gunmetal, Soylent, and Oz. And they are all for the color gallery. So look for a few new colors coming up here real soon.