An Afternoon with

Melanie Graham

104 COE Glass Colour Testing Results and Musings

Saturday, May 8, 2021

You may know Melanie Graham from the wonderful glass experiments that she shares on her blog “Mind Melt”. Throughout the site she shares all kinds of wonderful colour experiments that show color range, as well as the reactions between the tested glass and her standard “test palette colors.” For each glass tested, she also gives her general impressions gained from the various tests of that color. She has been documenting her findings on her blog since 2009.

When asked why she started this, Melanie’s answer is pretty much the same as she wrote on her blog’s About“ page: “I write this blog because I need this information in my own work, and it makes me happy to share it with other lampworkers. I provide the information that I myself want about the colours out in the marketplace, and get varying levels of assistance from the glass manufacturers. Much of the glass that I use for testing is purchased with my own money, and each set of tests takes me between 2-4 hours to execute, including the photography and writeup”.

We were fortunate that Melanie was willing to share a presentation discussing her extensive work of classifying glass reactions according to colors and all things that come together to cause certain traits for each color. In addition to the presentation, which was not recorded, Melanie gave us a pdf of the presentation and shared seven pages of glass documentation so that we might benefit from her research. Thank you Melanie, for your generosity in sharing this wonderful resource with us!

Members may access Melanie’s documentation by visiting the post on our Member’s only Facebook page.

If you would like to show some appreciation for her files or her blog, you may use this tip jar.