I've been fscinated by lots of mathematically inclined bead blog posts I've seen lately, so I thought I'd post a few of mine. The first one is just a simple pendant style necklace, but it's the diagram you always see illustrating the Pythagoran Theorum, with a 3/4/5 right triangle.
The one I've worked alot on, though is the ping pong ball bowl in pictures 2 & 3. 3 is, of course, the view from the top. It's based on the variation of the buckyball structure that uses 120 beads instead of 90, and so is just a bit bigger. But what stumped me for a while was the fact that if you stop halfway through to make a bowl instead of a whole sphere, the edge has no stiffness. I tried all sorts of things to stiffen it, but without much luck. Then I thought about the idea from the Beaded Molecules blog where you use heptagons instead of hexagons and that makes the shape flare out. So I added a row of heptagons and then tied the flared rim down to the bowl body, and voila! a stiff bowl. There's an exhibit coming up at our local art center called "Art for the Senses" and it's art that can be appreciated by people who are visually, or otherwise, impaired. Since this has lots of texture and is now sturdy enough to be handled I'll enter it.