pinterest

I've just started playing around with pinterest, as a way to get my work "out in the world" a bit more.  I put up a board with some pieces that have been on the blog before, and some that haven't. I haven't spent much time on pinterest, so I don't know the system too well yet.  Seems like there ought to be labels, like a blog has and like Etsy has so that if someone is interested in geometric jewelry or design, my work might come up, but I don't see anything like that.  Any suggestions?

Also, I should mention that one of my necklaces was chosen for the CraftForms exhibit at the Wayne Art Center, in Wayne, PA.  Also, I have work in the Artistry exhibit at the Guilford Art Center in Guilford, CT.  Both of these last into next year.

Rolling Bridge Necklace

One structure that I totally love is the Rolling Bridge in Paddington Basin, London.  If you don't know it here's a video link www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIl0bzyQD0.  It's a pedestrian bridge designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and it's just the most elegant structure.  I was telling a friend about it, and suddenly realized that it was a great inspiration for a necklace.  This was also a perfect idea because my husband and I are leaving in a week or so for a month in England.  We'll be up north around Manchester, so I won't actually get to see

the rolling bridge, but it still seemed just right to have a necklace inspired by a British structure.
  This one is  all octahedrons.  Like the bridge, it has 8 sections.  It's not quite finished ( I need to make more chain links, and I've ordered a hook clasp) but when it's done the clasp will be right where the chain meets the "bridge," That way you can hook it to just 1 end of the bridge and it will look like picture 1, or to both ends and it will be rolled up like picture 2.  The only way to get it to be totally straight like the bridge is to hang it upside down, like picture 3, but it's actually a bit long for that (around 7"), so that's mostly theoretical.
  I didn't initially plan on using the seed beads, but I was forgetting that if the individual octs are allowed to pivot any way they want they'll tend to hang with the longer, and heavier, beads down.  The bead

chains keep that from happening.  I'm used to using much bigger seed beads, but they would have made the strings of beads much too bulky.  Fortunately, FMG had once sent me a container of #15 beads in just the right iridescent gray, as one of their free gifts along with an order.  I almost didn't keep them, thinking  "what would I ever do with these tiny things?"  But it's hard to throw away free beads, so they were still in my stash, and worked out just right.
  That reminds me--if anyone knows of interesting galleries, artist, sbead stores etc. in the Manchester...Liverpool-ish area, I'd love to know about them.  Actually, our mobility will be pretty limited, as we'll be on a narrow boat on the canals up there, but you never know. 

Playing with an idea

Still playing with my chains of squarish octahedrons.  The last one I did, and posted about, was not as deep (that is, not as 3 dimensional, not standing up as far off the body) as most of my work.  The tubes to give it depth were 10 mm long.  Here I used more or less the same structure, but with tubes of 15 mm. They changed the geometry enough that once again the octs zigzag a bit, but that was fine here.
   It had occurred to me that you could also use those tubes as hinges and join rows of octs just at those hinges.  So that was what I did here.
   Then I started thinking of other beads I could use for the "waist" beads.  A while ago I had gotten strings and strings of marble beads on sale, and hadn't done a lot with them.  So I thought I'd try those.
  I had 2 sizes, 35mm long and 30 mm long.  I tried the larger ones first and got the structure you see here.  The ends of the marble beads were pretty wide, so I added a bronze colored bead to give a narrower end.  It came out quite zigzaggy, which I liked.  But the 35mm beads were awfully heavy, a

and I was afraid if I made a whole necklace like that it would be uncomfortable.
   I tried using the 30mm marble beads, and to keep more or less the same proportions, I changed the silver tubes from 25mm to 20mm.  The next picture shows that one.  I liked it, but somehow didn't decide to do a whole necklace like that.  But I thought that  single one made a great pendant, so I just finished off the one, and I'm putting that on etsy.










  What I finally ended up with was using the smaller (30mm) marble beads, and 25mm silver tubes.  That made each oct more

square, so I changed the 2 tubes on each outside face  to 20mm ones, and got just enough curve.  It's not quite finished, but here's a preview.  Each 2-oct structure is 2" long, so I'll have 9 of them hinged together.
  The fun part of all this is to take an idea and watch it evolve, and see what you can do with it.

New octahedron piece

This is sort of a follow up on a post I did in January.  In that post I showed and talked about a necklace I had made in which I built octahedrons sized so that adjoining faces were almost at right angles to one another.  Each oct had a "waist" made of 2 short ( 10mm) tubes and 2 long gold filled tubes.  The angles weren't quite right angles because the 25mm gold filled tubes weren't quite long enough to be hypotenuses.  That would have required tubes of about 27mm, and I like to use stock sizes where I can.  So  on the sides of the piece the octs zigzagged a bit.
  In that post I mentioned wanting to use this idea to make a piece that was something on the order of a tic-tac-toe grid.  When I started to do it with the zigzagging rows of octs, I found that the intersecting rows weren't quite at right angles to one another.  To get that, I really did need octs that had right angles between their faces, so using the same 20 mm beads on the non-waist edges, I really did need 27mm waist tubes.
  It turns out the perfect solution was to use a 25mm tube with  a #11 seed bead at each end.  I wanted to use my anodised aluminum tubes instead of the gold filled ones, so that each chain of octs would have a different color, and I've found that with the aluminum tubes I'm pretty much always happier if I put a seed bead at each end of the tube.  That's because the aluminum tubes are quite a bit fatter than the silver ones, and so the open hole at each end of the tube is unattractive.  The addition of the seed beads solved both problems.

dangles redone; learning about structures

   Well, I redid my dangles, as I mentioned in my last post, and they do indeed dangle more freely now.
    The thing I probably should have talked more about concerning this necklace is the tube itself.  It took several tries to get it right.  The nice thing about doing more random structures is that when you need it to curve, you can just start throwing in a few short tubes on one side and longer ones on the other side till you get the amount of curve you need,  But with a piece like this, where you keep repeating a structural shape, you have to get the shape right so that it will produce the curve you need.  My initial plan was that my tube would be octahedrons ( I call them octahedrons because they're made of 8 triangles, but, of course, they're not equilateral triangles as they would be in a true octahedron).  The cross-section triangle would be all short (15mm) tubes .  The tubes running more or less lengthwise would be 20 mm, except that to get the curve I wanted the triangle on the outside would have 25mm tubes.  I'm trying to use tubes of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 mm and make that work without cutting special lengths for a particular piece.  Anyway, it didn't work--the curve was too tight.  I tried 2 more variations before I came up with this one, where the cross-sectional triangle alternates between a 15mm equilateral one and an isosceles one.  That made a curve that was just a bit too shallow, but I had a few longer tubes (28-ish mm) so I could put them in the 2 outside triangles at the very center, i.e. bottom of the necklace and get a sharper curve just there.
  This brings up a whole new idea--that I have to move from thinking of a piece as a chain of units, and think more about the overall piece as a unit.  I came up against this same issue some years ago in a sphere I made and posted about at the very start of this blog.  My idea was to take the basic dodecahedron ( Plato bead in

some publications) and think of it as a bead to use in building a bigger sphere, a truncated icosahedron ( or Archimedes bead).  That's what I did here (sort of--Actually there are 60 small spheres, not 90, but anyway...).  I built it adding on 1 sphere after another, and when I got to the last 4 or 5 spheres it was really hard to get the needle in and out as the big sphere closed up.  After I was done I realized it would have gone much easier if after I had gotten, say, 2/3 done I had switched my viewpoint to the whole sphere.  Then I could have built the whole inside of the rest of the sphere, the very dark blue beads, then the whole middle layer, the clear beads, and finished with the outer cobalt blue layer.

    Now I'm have the same issue with my tube necklaces. Here's one in particular.  I've been using a chain of tetrahedrons to make either a bracelet or a necklace.  Mostly the only way I could make the structure go from making a bracelet to making a necklace was to make all the tetrahedrons bigger. 

  But then I rethought, and realized there are sort of 3 parts to the structure.  The last picture shows it (I hope) with bugle beads.  First there's a series of triangles at the top of the structure, which will be the inside of the curve.

In this example they're a sort of light iridescent gray, and you can see them by themselves on the left.  By playing with the size of these triangles you can vary the height of the piece.  I have tended so far to make it tall  and sort of dog collar-ish.  Then there are the tubes (here dark gray and spirally) that turn those original triangles into tetrahedrons, so that the dog collar becomes a spiked dog collar, as in the center.  Actually you could leave the piece like this, and one of these days I probably will. 
   Finally, you have the zigzagging tubes on the outside edge of the curve.  Here I have just 2 bright silver ones on the far right.  It turns out that the length of these tubes determines the shape of the curve.  Here I've used tubes that are shorter than the other ones.  By using shorter tubes (20mm instead of 30mm) you almost eliminate the curve in the structure.  The longer the tube the tighter the curve.  So now I understand the structure and will have much more control over what I build with it.

  This has been pretty windy, but spelling it out helps me get it into my head, so if you've gotten this far, my apologies for the length.  Also the paragraphing got real weird at the end and I don't have the energy to go back and fix it.  Happy New Year.
  

Charms

    I have a new project going.  I'm going to be showing my jewelry at the Baltimore ACC show next February.  They are doing a promotion around charms.  If you want to participate you have to commit to make, at a minimum. certain specified pieces.  For example, a charm bracelet, a necklace with a cluster of charms grouped at the bottom,  some loose charms, etc.  Then they do a certain amount of promotion, not relevant here, around charms.  It seemed ideal for my work, although, I've never made charms as such. 
   Anyway, ever since I signed up, I've been playing with making charms, as they need images of the work next month.  Some of them will be geometric structures made of tubes,  but I wanted to play with ways to mix gemstone beads with the tube structures.  These are what I've come up with so far.
   One thing that is inspiring me is I picture I look at from time to time in an old American Craft magazine from 2011.  It was about the glass school at Pilchuck, in Washington, and it had pictures of work of lots of glass artists who have been associated with Pilchuck over the years.  The one that interested me was a picture of vessels by Dante Marioni.  In it he had set himself some tight parameters. The vessels were all roughly the same size and were all made of clear glass with black glass trim.  But within those limits he had made over 150 vessels, each different from all the others and all interesting.  It sort of made me think of a Chopin etude, which is a piece you use to practice a technique, but that doesn't stop it from being beautiful.
  Anyway, I have lots more charms to make, but this is where I'm headed.

Live and learn

    I wanted to do something simple and rather stark with my oxidized silver tubes.  Cubic RAW was an obvious choice.  I'd never used it with the tubes, and I didn't really think it would work, but I tried it.
    Over time I've developed a sort of rule of thumb.  With round beads I don't much like structures that use triangles (i e circles of 3 beads) because too much thread shows.  Particularly I don't like to use monofilament  nylon fishing line and have 3-bead circles, because it won't pull tight over such a hard bend, and so lots of it sticks out.  I do occasionally do cuboctahedrons, which are a mix of 3-bead and 4-bead circles, but I tend to avoid them  when I can.  Similarly, with long narrow beads, and particularly with my metal tubes, I mostly only use triangles, because that's the only shape that will stay rigid with long beads.  So I have lots of tetrahedrons and octahedrons, because they're made of triangles.If you tried to make a circle out of 5 tubes, it wouldn't stay round, but could take most any shape.  When I have used 4-bead circles, I've always kept the cross section a triangle, because then, even if the squares turned into parallelograms, it still couldn't completely lose its shape, and it would remain 3 dimensional.
   However, I've come to realize that while a single cube made out of tubes is pretty apt to not stay much like a cube, a series of them will have more stability.  Also, when I was using oxidized copper tubes I used fireline thread, because there wasn't enough room for monofilament, which is fatter.  But the silver tubes, although they're the same size on the outside, seem to have a thinner wall, so there's room inside for more thread.  So here I used monofilament line to support the corners of the cubes better.  The piece moves alot, but it still holds its shape quite well.  It's big, because I wanted it to just go over the head without a clasp, so the pieces that form the long side of each rectangle are around an inch.  Anyway, I enjoyed doing it, and may do more along that line.  One thing I'd like to do just for comparison, is a simple rectangular necklace like this, but made out of a string of octahedrons instead of cubes.  Then I can see whether a much more rigid piece works as well on the body as one, like this, with more give.

Addendum

    This is sort of an add-on to my post earlier today.  I have a couple of local art festivals coming up, so I may not do any blogging for a few weeks.  So I thought I'd take a quick picture of the straight, but spiraled string of tetrahedrons I came up with.  I think it's kind of cool. 
    By the way, thinking of festivals, if anyone will be in the Chicago area, I'll be showing my jewelry at the Highland Park (northern suburb) Festival of Fine Craft the last weekend in June.

Back to geometry

   First of--apologies for the blurry pictures; I didn't haul out the tripod as I should have.
    I've been playing with structures of tetrahedrons again.  Last September I did a post or 2 about some necklaces I made using really long bugle beads to form chains of tetrahedrons (tets).  I liked them but got concerned about the sharpness of the edges of the bugle beads.  Even adding a seed bead at the end of each bugle, I was a bit worried about the fireline fraying.  I decided not to use magnet clasps because I didn't like to be pulling the necklace apart as you do with a magnet clasp, for fear of cutting a thread. 
  Anyway, I started in again, but this time using the oxidized copper tubes I've been using lately.  If you just keep adding tets in the most logical order they make a circle.  I think ( if anyone knows for sure, I'd love corroboration or correction)  that tetrahedrons will tile infinitely in space with no gaps the same way that cubes will.  But they do it in a very curvilinear way.  For example, 20 tets form an icosahedron, which is essentially spherical.  Still, if they'll tile in 3 dimensions, there had to be a chain of tets that would curve  gradually, or even go straight.  But I was having a hard time getting a chain of tets that had a shallow enough curve.  The chain I had used with the 30mm bugles last fall, didn't work with my 22 mm tubes.  The curve was too tight, and I ended up turning it into a bracelet instead of a necklace.
     I spent lots of time coming up with the second structure.  I found a chain of 8 tetrahedrons which didn't bend much.  Then I marked the last tet with a piece of yarn and started adding tets to the chain so that that marked tet was the center of a symmetrical chain of 15 tets.  Then I moved the yarn and extended the 15 tet chain to 29.  I'm sure there are computer designing programs that would figure out something like this for you, but I'll admit I learned alot using this seat of the pants method.  And I got a chain that curved just the right amount.  I've even found a chain that goes straight.  It makes a gentle spiral as it goes, so it's pretty cool.  I don't have a picture of it yet, but I'll post one when I do.  All in all, it was a fun endeavor.

keggin and keggin-ish structures

    I'm on a 2-week break, since the store that my husband and I own is closed for the holidays.  Just when I had lots of free time, the beaded molecules folks (thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com) posted a set of pictures that set me off on another structural journey.
The structure is called a keggin structure and wikipedia says it's the form of certain acid molecules.  I confess to not being much interested in the chemistry of it, but only in the geometry.  Geometrically. the structure is made of groups of 3 octahedrons that serve as the triangles in a larger structure.  The top  picture shows one such unit.  You can see on one edge (the top in this pic) there's a big triangle, and on the other edge (bottom) there are 3 small triangles that meet at a point in the center.   4 of these units, with the 1-triangle side on the outside and the 3-triangle side to the cente, form a  tetrahedron-ish thing.
    In thebeaded molecules site they showed 5 versions of this structure, identified by Greek letters that I don't have the font to write.  Picture 2 is the alpha version.  Till I made it, I couldn't tell how the others differed.  Turns out that in the alpha version, the triangles on the outside all line up with edges parallel to one another.  In the beta version one of them is point-to-edge.  Each of the others has 1 more triangle arranged point-to-edge till all 4 are that way.  But I had to see it in front of me before I understood it.  It's really hard to show a 3 dimensional structure like this well in a flat picture.  Even more so for me because I don't have 2 colors of bugle beads in the same length just now.
  Anyway, that's it for the Keggin structure.  But for me, since I'm dealing with it just as a geometric structure, not as a chemical thing, it seemed that the next logical step would be to take 8 of these triangle-ish units and make an octahedral version of the structure. So that's picture 3.  Then I took the 8 triangle version and made all the triangles point-to-edge instead of edge-to-edge.  That's the last picture.  I also improved things in that one by making the seed bead accents on the outside a different color from those on the inside of the structure, so that it's easier to read what's going on.
     A person just a little crazier than I  could also take 20 of the 3-octahedron units and make an icosahedron, but I think I've just about exhausted my interest in this.

Stone teardrops

This is a piece I've had in the back of my head for a while.  I wanted to take the basic buckeyball shape and extend 1 end out to make a teardrop shape.  I got that worked out and then came up with a smaller version for the back of the necklace.  The trickiest part was getting 2 "stalk" to come out of 1 ball a
in fairly close proximity so that I could get it to form 2 strands at the bottom.  All in all, I think it worked out nicely.

hexagon shapes

    This turned into a fun project/experiment.  I wanted to create a focal piece for a pendant that was asymmetrical. Something sort of porkchop shaped was what I had in mind.  The part I felt would be hardest was the quick 180 degree turn I wanted at the top.  Looking at some of my earlier samples, I found a way to create it.  From there it was pretty straightforward to create the first shape in the picture.  But it wasn't quite what I wanted.  I had wanted a curvier, rounder shape, not just a series of hard 120 degree turns.  This led me to look again at tubes and shapes I had made in the past. 
   I knew, although I hadn't thought about it too much, that there are 2 different ways to make a tube out of hexagons.  They can be aligned either point-top or flat-top.  That is when the tube itself is pointing up and down the hexagons in it can either have a flat side up or a point (vertex).  The one on the left is made of flat-top hexes.  This is a bit counterintuitive, as they look pointy at the top.  In just the same way, when you do RAW, a "square" (4 bead circle) made with round beads actually looks more like a diamond than a square, and you have to remind yourself to think only of the thread path, which is indeed a square.
   Anyway, if you do a flat-top tube the beads appear to align lengthwise and accentuate the squareness of the tube (in both cases the tubes were made with a 4-hex circumference) and the hardness of the angles. So I decided to try to create a similar shape using point-top hexagons.  With point-top hexagons you get the appearance of rows of beads aligning around the circumference of the tube.  As I expected, I couldn't get as tight a bend at the top (I'm sure there's a way; I just haven't found it yet), but I got a much rounder tube and a more fluid, organic shape.  All in all, more what I was looking for.

Cage pieces

     I love the idea of a bead or beaded shape caged within another shape, loose enough that it can move around but not get out.  I did it once with seed beads.  It was a bright colored dodecahedron caged inside a clear buckeyball.  I liked it but have never done another.  These oxidized copper tube bead shapes are ideal for that kind of treatment, and it's been on my to-do list for a while. an individual large bead caged in a structure would be nice, but you'd want it to be undrilled, so not really a bead at all.  I've thought of a marble.  Problem is I only have access to 3 sizes of tubes (and one is quite short, to it's effectively 2 sizes), so you need to be able to size the inside piece to the cage, so that it's small enough to move, but not so small it can fall out.

    Patricia Madeja does a really nice pendant with an undrilled pearl captured in a gold cube.  But I can't use a cube because a 4-sided shape isn't rigid when done in tube beads.  Also the sizing between the sphere and the square has a pretty small tolerance.  I found the same to be true if I used a tetrahedron cage, i.e. if it was big enough to not fall out it couldn't move much.  An octahedron, though, worked really well, as you can see.  There's lots of  room for the inner balls to move.  In the bracelet and the back of the necklace I used RAW cubes inside octahedrons made of 12 mm tubes.  In the front of the necklace I used dodecahedrons inside 22 mm shapes.  All the inside shapes are made from 4 mm stone beads. 

   There was just one minor problem with the necklace.  The point of the oct is toward your neck as you wear it, so it feels just a bit prickly.  It's not bad; I wore it all day, but I noticed it just  bit.  After this picture was taken I added a small bead at the inner and outer points of the octs, but it didn't really change anything.  It's not any sharpness in the tubes themselves that creates the slight prickliness, but just the shape of the oct itself.  It wasn't noticeable at all on the bracelet, where the weight is evenly distributed. Both pieces are quite lightweight, it's just that in the necklace whatever weight there is is concentrated in 4 points on your neck.  2 possible answers: reposition the octs so that there's a triangular face toward you instead of a vertex; or leave out the octs at the back of the necklace altogether.  I'm experimenting with both.

Shapes

        I've been taking some time to try to expand my vocabulary of the shapes I can make using round gemstone beads.  These are 4 mm, mostly red aventurine, for no particular reason except that I had a lot of it.  I was interested in the idea of graduated sizes, so I came up with 4 sizes of disks, 3 of sort of teardrop shapes and a couple of  kind of lozenge-ish shapes.  The curvy pieces at the top left had to do with trying to make shapes that were not just convex (I think that's right, I sometimes get concave and convex mixed up, but anyway shapes that curved inward as well as outward).  I made a necklace using the graduated rounds.  Unfortunately, I hadn't figured out the 4th, largest, disk yet, so it just has 3 sizes.  That 4th size, by the way, is pretty big-- 2 1/2" in diameter (6.2ish cm).
     

Scaffold with gemstone shapes

  I've been wanting to combine gemstone beads with my oxidized copper scaffold structures.  The first one I did ( I don't have a picture of it) was quite a regular, repeating structure.  Also, it used just one kind of gemstone, and it was gray feldspar, so it didn't add a lot of color.  Anyway, nice, but I wanted something with more unpredictability to it.  This is what I came up with.  It uses red agate, red aventurine, green marble, blue quartz, yellow quartz and gray feldspar.  Also, no 2 scaffold structures are alike.  I think it's much more interesting.  I've never "strung" beads on a cord, so it is more complicated to incorporate the colored shapes with the oxidized copper, but I got it to work.

The trickiest shapes to use were the cubes.  Each gemstone shape has a tube bead running through it.  When I made my first cube (they're 2x2x2 cubes) I discovered the only way I could put a tube through it was like this:
The tube had to go through the middle of one of the rows of cubes, so it's offset on the total cube.  If the cube were 3x3x3 cubes there'd be a path down the middle, but that would be way too big.  But then it occurred to me that this cube, which is made of 54 beads, has just 2 running down each center axis.  So you could just leave out 2 beads, and you'd have one center axis that was free.    So I took it apart and left out 2 center beads, and got the one in the 2nd picture.  I couldn't figure  out a very effiicient path to build it without those 2 center beads, but anyway, I got it done.

3 cube pendant

Since I wrote last time about the steps it took me to get to this design, I figured I ought to post the final product.  Quite simple, but I'm pleased with it.

Red Gemstone Necklace

Since I've been doing these tube necklaces in nickel silver beads, I've wanted to use the same techniques in a piece made from gemstone beads.  This is the first one.  It's made from brecciated jasper beads (the dark ones) and red agate beads as accents.  I like the way the colors bring out the geometry of the piece.  Stone beads are a little slower to work with, because the holes are so small, but I like them, and will probably do more.  I used fireline for thread.  I mostly have been using monofilament nylon, for the extra body, but it's too bulky in these small holes, and I've found that if I make an extra pass all around the circumference as I end each round of hexagons, I get sufficient body.  By the way, I've experimented with different sizes of tubes, measured by the number of hexagons that make a "row", and for the most part I find a 4 hexagon circumference works well.  That's what I've used here.

Cubic super RAW

     I did 2 different structures trying to "cubify" Gwen Fisher's super RAW.  I didn't have access to the her blog as I was doing them, which is good, because It turned out that neither is the structure she used.  I wanted to keep the octagon in alternating colors that her flat version has.  What I ended up with is according to my handy wikipedia list of Archimedean solids, a truncated cube (i.e.a cube with the corners cut off to form triangles at the corners)  I did a single version and a double.  One thing I remembered about Gwen's version, though, is that it had hexagons at the corners, and this one has triangles.  So I tried again.  That's picture #3, and in the Archimedean solids it's a truncated cuboctahedron.  The funny thing is that it's actually the same bead I did several posts ago, and I called it Gwen's bead, because O it's relationship with something that I can't now remember.  I'll have to go back to those posts and look, but meanwhile I seem to have arrived at the same bead, approaching from 2 different directions.
    It was the different arrangements of the colors that made me not initially recognise the structure I saw.  Similarly it was the different color arrangements that made me not recognise the structure that Gwen had actually made for her CSRAW  (maybe we should call it super cubic right angle weave, because SCRAW is alot more pronounceable than CSRAW).  Anyway her structure is a truncated octahedron, which is one of my favorite shapes because you can incorporate a round(ish) structure with RAW.  I usually do it in a single color, and so I didn't recognise it.
   It occurs to me that one reason I usually do structures in a single color dates back to my learning to weave them.  I learned both the Plato bead (dodecahedron) and Archimedes bead (truncated icosahedron) from Valerie Hector's book.  I had, of course, no idea at the time how the names Plato and Archimedes were related to the shapes.  Anyway, the Archimedes bead took me a while and I had to do it in 2 colors in order to keep track of what I was doing.  I felt like it was a personal milestone when I got to where I could keep track of it without the "crutch" of 2 colors.  Now I'm starting to realize that the color arrangements can enhance the pieces.  Hmm...some rethinking may be in order.

One of my favorite uses of the truncated octahedron (clearly we need a shorter name) is, in fact, analogous to what Gwen's molecule did in her last post.  It's a series of necklaces that I call my Garland series.  This is my favorite of them.  It's the interesting angles as which the RAW sections come off the spheres that makes them interesting.
 
  

Funky scaffold

I think in my last post about beadwork, I said that since that piece was very controlled, I wanted to something funky next. Well, here it is. More and more, I've come to realize that I sort of have 2 distinct bodies of work, one very controlled, and one looser. I like them both, and they seem to resonate with different parts of me. I do the same with my rugs, although there I've moved more and more to the looser designs, with color families instead of single colors, and a more improvisational style. Partly as I get more confident with something, I loosen up a bit, although I still like the controlled pieces too. This necklace is a really simple right angle weave, done with oxidized copper tube beads. I used 2 different lengths of tubes, though, chosen mostly at random, which makes it asymmetrical, and gives it life (I think). I broke one of my rules with it though. I have come up with a general rule for my work that when I'm using round beads I generally create shapes out of polygons with at least 4 sides. I use triangles some, but generally I don't like the amount of thread that shows in a triangle. Mostly I use cubes, dodecahedrons, buckeyballs, etc. But with long beads, those sort of polygons don't hold their shape, so I stick to triangles, which are rigid. I mostly make things using tetrahedrons, octahedrons and sometimes icosahedrons, all of which are based on the triangle. This necklace is an exception to that rule, since most of it uses 4 sided shapes (I can't say squares because of the difference in the lengths of the tubes). If I had made it all with tubes of the same length, it would totally collapse. Because of the irregularity of the tube lengths, it can't quite collapse, and where it does collapse, it does so in interesting ways. At the back of the necklace, mostly to reduce the size, I changed it so that the cross-sections were triangles, and the sides were 4-sided, and it's a bit firmer there. Also at the bottom I added a second row with triangle cross-sections, both to create a focal area and to firm it up a bit. Still it's squishier than most of my work, but I kind of like the squishiness.

More shapes

Isn't geometry great? After making the bead I showed (badly) in the last post, I wanted to make more. The original one, which is the 1st one in both of these pictures, was based on the cuboctahedron, which has 24 edges. So I wanted to make some shapes based on solids with a fairly similar number of edges, so they could come out similar in size. The 2nd shape in the group is based on the truncated tetrahedron, which has 18 edges. I thought about doing a dodecahedron or icosahedron, but they both have 30 edges, so would be bigger than I thought I wanted. So I went to the list of Johnson solids (Hurray for wikipedia) and found more shapes. I especially like the last 2 that are dome shaped--they're called cupolas on the list--because I'm thinking of making a bracelet with several shapes linked together, and those give a flat side to have on the inside with the "dome" facing out. One of them is basically an icosahedron with the bottom 5 triangles cut off, so it has 25 edges. The smaller one has a hexagon on the bottom and 18 edges. I posted 2 pictures of the shapes so you could see them from the top as well as the side. One thing I've been meaning to do is put together a tutorial and see if anyone's interested in learning how to make one. I might do it with one of these shapes. I don't have a graphics type program, but would do it with lots of photos.