Combined structures

I've been thinking about the fact that I've been working with 2 different structures lately.  With the round gemstone beads I work with a system based on hexagons that is the outgrowth of what I learned from the Beaded Molecules blog.  Then I have another set of shapes based on triangles that I use with the silver tube beads.  I really like the openness of the tube structures, but it occurred to me that I could accentuate the not-there-ness of the tubes by having areas of more there-ness using gemstone beads.  I've done that in several pieces by having structures of gemstones and having them interlock with other structures, made of tubes.  I've liked that, but I wanted to find a way to integrate them into a single structure that goes from tubes in triangles to stone beads in 6 bead circles (functionally hexagons) and back again.  This does that, and I think I'll do more along this line.
  I've also been playing around with photography again.  This picture was done by hanging the necklace (with loops of monofilament line that I can then photoshop out) from a hoop of  steel cable with the background behind it but not touching it.  Here it's close enough that you still see the shadow of the piece on the background.  Can't decide if I like that.  I did it again with the background farther away, and that may be better.  I hadn't actually planned on putting that picture in the blog, but now that I've mentioned it I guess I will.  It's a more dramatic
picture, but for some reason I couldn't get it so that you could see the light aqua of the beads very well.  I think I need more light.

Octahedron shapes.

   I've been playing around with the different shapes I can get in octahedrons.  I started thinking about how I don't get a firm shape using RAW with tube beads because a square isn't rigid the way a triangle is.  But on the other hand right angles are just so "freindly" to work with.  We're surrounded by them, and we know how they work.  So I started imagining  octahedrons (octs)that were more or less square in overall shape. I wanted the piece to be not too deep, i.e. not sticking up too far off the body (as lots of my pieces do).  So with a relatively flat oct I could just use Pythagorus to figure out how long to make the "waist" beads--here the gold beads-- so that you'd have a right triangle, and that would make a square shaped oct.  The cross-wise and length-wise tubes are 20mm long, so a 28mm gold tube would be about right.  Actually, though, I decided to use 25mm cold tubes instead, so the octs aren't quite square, but zigzag a bit.  Partly that was because I thought a bit of a zigzag was more interesting, and partly because I prefer using more or less stock lengths rather than cutting tubes just for a single design.  If I use stock lengths (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25mm), I have more flexibility in the design.  If I cut custom pieces ahead of time, I have to have it all figured out before I do it, and I like to sort of make it up as I go along, even if I have the general idea figured out at the start.  Also there would be lots of times that I would cut lots of, say 28mm tubes and then discover that to get the right curve, I really needed them to be 27.5 or 29mm or whatever. 
   Here, when I got to the back and needed to make it curve, I had to use shorter tubes on the inside triangles than on the outside ones.  The ideal length for the inside tubes would have been around 18mm, so I just alternated between 15mm tubes in 1 oct and 20mm ones in the next.  One of these days I'd like to skip the curve and do a piece that would look sort of like a tic-tac-toe grid.  

Another scaffold

I'm really getting into these dark tube bead pieces. I've done several now, and I think this is my favorite. With the one I talked about in the last post, I was concerned that, because it was done mostly in right angle weave, it was a bit too floppy, because 4-sided figures are not rigid the way triangles are. In this one I modified it by using triangles for the cross-sections, but 4-sided figures otherwise. That way it still has lots of flex, but it can't collapse totally flat. I think one reason I like these pieces is that they avoid the tendency toward "preciousness" that I think is easy to fall into in beadwork. Using these beads, even if you do a symmetrical piece it's kind of ____, I can't think of the word exactly; not masculine, obviously, but not overly feminine and pretty. Anyway, it works for me.

Linked triangles necklace

I thought I'd write something about how my designs evolve as I create them. I tend not to do alot of preliminary drawing or planning. I just have an idea and see how it works out as I make it. Not the most efficient method, as you can see here. I wanted a series of triangles made from nickel silver beads joined by metallic seed beads. The first time I started (I don't have a picture of this)the triangles were too close together, and I wanted a more open effect. The picture here is my second try. I got enough space between the triangles, but in doing so, it seemed to me that the colored seed beads sort of overwhelmed the triangles, and I had wanted the triangles to dominate. Also, I had intended to make the whole necklace a hexagon shape, using the way triangles tile to make the "corners". You can see one corner in the picture. But I found that you don't have much control over the size of the sides that way. That is, if 5 triangles is a bit too small for a side, you have to add 2 more triangles, which is an additional 2" or more, when maybe you just wanted another 1/2" or so. So I decided to make the circle by just making the hinges on the outside of the circle longer than the ones on the inside of the circle.

This is how it's looking so far, and I like it much better. At shows people always ask how long it took to make a piece. I hate that question. And often, I wonder whether I'm supposed to count just what they're looking at, or all the false starts that went into the designing of it.

triangle structures

This foray into torus structures is a new focus for me. Before this I've been doing lots of work with long beads. You can't really do structures based on pentagons, hexagons, or really even squares with those because they immediately get wobbly. I've stuck pretty much to structures based on triangles, like tetrahedrons (tets), octahedrons (octs) and, to a lesser extent, icosahedrons. What I really love is the structure known as the octet truss, which is made of alternating octs and tets. They will extend out into a plane of any size. It's a structure engineers use. In fact the first time I googled it I got a picture of the overhead structure at a new terminal at Heathrow airport. If you do it in all directions you can create larger octs and tets. I've attached some of my jewelry piece that use it, mostly to create triangles.