The glass I started making beads with is called Moretti, or sometimes Effetre/Moretti (Moretti was the original glassmaking family; Effetre is the company that now owns the Moretti name and makes the glass). It's made in Venice, Italy, on the famous glassmaking island of Murano. Moretti is a soft glass that melts readily in a 2000-degree flame, yet can be shaped and molded into intricately detailed forms.
These are my test beads for Moretti's transparent colors. The ones on the left are the "handmade" colors -- harder to find and more expensive than the standard colors on the right. True violets are very hard to achieve in glass, thanks to the limitations of chemistry, but the dark bead next to the pale yellow one is a violet-blue ("Ink Blue") which beadmakers have been going gaga over since Moretti started making it. You can see the color better on the small round bead near the top of Picture #3. I put a layer of Ink Blue over an opaque white bead so the color would pop out.
