What I'm doing now

     Like the rest of you, I'm still home, still experimenting with jewelry structures. I'm still playing with the tetrahedron structure I talked about earlier.  The piece on the right in the picture above is one I showed in my original group of these structures a few months ago.  I liked it, but felt that the central tet, which is built from an octahedron and 4 tets, didn't show up as well as it might have. So I redid it, using gold filled tubes for that center tet, and making it a bit curvier.  Actually I like them both.  I tend to think of pieces with the gold filled tubes as being a bit dressier, so there's a place for both.

     There have been a few happenings in my jewelry making life that I wanted to mention:

            My work is now available online through Contemporary Craft, in Pittsburgh.  The gallery is closed, but there's a good selection online at contemporarycraftstore.com.

            I'm really excited to have been accepted to the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show.  The show is the first week in November, and it too will be online, and you will be able to see and buy work there. 

          

Another new gallery is Wearever Jewelry in Alexandria, VA.  My work is not yet on their  website, but they're open if you're in the area, and I'm sure if you contacted them you  could also buy it online.

            I'll have work in an online show Uncommon Threads on October 18.  It's run by the Fine Line Art Center in St Charles IL. You can find out more at fineline.com

Finally I thought I'd just let you know that these tet structures aren't the only thing I've been doing, jewelry-wise.  Since they're mostly pretty planned and controlled, I had great fun with a necklace that's the opposite of that.  Here's that one. I'm really proud of it.

new work and galleries

I thought I'd do a post of what I've been up to lately.  Another piece where individual structures are interlinked to form a chain. For each link, I made an octahedron out of gold filled tubes, then added 8 long oxidized silver tubes to form another octahedron on the outside of it.  It took a while to get it right because so many tubes were ending at the same place.  Eventually I added a small round silver bead to separate the outer oct from the inner one, and that seemed to make it work.
The other thing I've been working on this summer is getting my work into galleries.  I traveled around and talked to places, and I've gotten a few new ones, so if you're in any of these areas, I hope you'll stop by and take a look:
Albuquerque--Mariposa Gallery, 3500 Central Ave, mariposa-gallery.com
New Orleans--Ariodante Gallery, 535 Julia St, ariodantegallery.com
Chicago--Pistachios, 55 E Grand Ave, pistachiosonline.com

new collar with gold

I love this piece!  A few posts ago I talked about using some long beads on the outside of one of these collars and how it made the outside edge scallop. I had done it with stone and marble beads and didn't like the mix, but mentioned I might do it with gold tubes. Just finished this one and I really like it. I'm doing more these days with the gold (actually gold-filled) tubes as accents. and I think the contrast with the dark silver really works. For my own use, I mostly stick to the plain oxidized silver pieces, as they're less dressy, as is my lifestyle. But I do like making these silver and gold pieces. They tend to be simpler, and less funky, because when I piece has lots of different shapes and structures, then I think the contrasting color is  distraction.  But it makes a more classic piece pop.
By the way, after writing the earlier blog post about this structure, I forgot to read it before making this piece, and so had to redo it  after getting around 1/3 of the way around.  In the post the dark tubes were 28mm and the stone tubes on the outside edges were 20-35-20.  In this one I started out using all 28s except for the long 35mm ones on the outside, so no 20s on the outside.  That made the outside too long relative to the inside, so it curved was too tightly to fit your neck into it. So I changed the inside tubes to 31mm.  It's still a pretty tight circle.  If I wanted it a bit longer, instead of round, I'd make2 of the inside tubes in each side 35s instead of 31s.  That would add a bit more length, but mostly it would make the curve shallower at that point. There are 12 inside tubes, so I'd change 3,4, 9 and 10. Actually I might just change 3 and 10 (talking to myself here) because you really want to do it when the line of the necklace is 90 degrees from the center point, so you're making it just longer, not wider.

Another neckwire piece

I liked playing around with shapes on a neckwire a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd try another.  I think the rectangles with gold zigzagging down them worked well.  makes for a pretty wearable piece, as well as an attractive one.

Developing an idea

 I've been making lots of pieces like the first one here: repeats of a structure like an oct, separated by biggish stone beads.  And I've varied it by using different structures, but always a repeat of the same one.  I've wanted to do 2 things--eliminate the beads and vary the structures.  Leaving out the beads means you don't have the color limitation, i. e. you're not limited to wearing it with an outfit that goes with red. There are 2 ways to do this.  One would be to put a closed ring between the octs (or whatever structures) Or they could interlink directly with one another.  Here I interlinked them. It means that you need to build more structures, as they overlap, but it makes the design tighter. I like this one, and I think pretty soon I'll make another one with the pentagonal shapes done in gold filled beads.
   As with most of my ideas, I start out being rigidly symmetrical, and then later I play with the idea in a freer, asymmetrical way.  Picture 3 shows me doing this design in that way.  I think its my best one so far.  I also think adding the gold makes the piece more interesting, without limiting the colors you can wear it with.  Now I'd like to extend that more asymmetrical, more random approach to some of my very structural pieces.

New scaffold with gold

I've just finished a scaffold piece with accent tubes of 14 kt gold.  Structurally it's similar to the one with blue and green accents below, with 2 exceptions.  Both are based on chains of tetrahedrons.  The sides are tetrahelices, but at the bottom I've massed larger groups of tetrahedrons.  They're based on the idea that 5 tets that share a single center edge, like a hub, will form a circle.  You can see such a group of 5 at the center bottom in each piece.  Trouble is it doesn't actually work.  For it to work exactly the angle between sides of a tet would have to be 72 degrees (I don't have a font that will write math symbols) so that 5 of them would add up to 360.  But it's actually around 70.5 degrees.  It would work if the hub tube were a little longer than the others.  But when you start extending

the structure as I've done at the bottom of the piece you can't do that because a tube that is a hub in one group is a spoke or rim in other groups.  So things don't quite work, and it gets worse the further you go. One of the reasons I've added small seed beads at the ends of each tube on the bottom piece is to add more "wiggle room".
    But a while ago my favorite blog, (thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com) showed a picture of the 8 possible convex deltahedrons ( ie convex shapes made exclusively from equilateral triangles) and one of them was essentially my 5 tet circle but without a hub tube at the center.  That got me thinking, and in the new piece I left out some of the hubs where I could.  Just leaving out 5 tubes made it fit together much better.
         The other change I made was where the necklace curves around your neck at the back.  You can take a tetrahelix and go off in a new direction that's about a 30 or 40 degree change (I've never measured it).  I did 2 such jogs in the bottom piece to get to the clasp.  It's fine, but I wasn't entirely happy with the sharpish corners that stick out.  So in the new piece I made the tetrahelix curve by simply shortening the inside tubes, and it makes a smoother finish.
        I'm really enjoying working with gold tubes.  I think the contrast with the dark silver accentuates the geometry nicely.  What I have to be careful about, though, is that the high cost of the gold tubing has a tendency to make me more conservative about what I make.Starting out, most of my gold pieces, like this one, are variations on designs that I already know I like.  But if it works, I'm sure I'll get braver.