reinventing the wheel, design-wise

    When I was doing the sampler I talked about last time, the hardest thing to figure out was an outside right angle in 2 directions like you have on the corner of a cube.  I tried several ways before I got one I liked.  My plan was to make 3 interlocked cubes, where each outside corner
 would turn into a long tube that would go behind the neck to form a pendant.  I wanted it to be pretty big and chunky, for maximum impact.  But by the time I had made 2 cubes using 4 mm stone beads, I realized it was just too big for jewelry (it would have stuck out over 2 1/2" from the body).  You can see in the picture there's still line (fireline) hanging off one of the cubes.  That's because It was pretty complicated and I did lots of backtracking to fix mistakes.  As I finished it up I found 1 last mistake, and haven't yet worked up the ambition to tear out the last corner to fix it.  It's one that only I would notice--but I would notice it. 

    Anyway, I decided to start again, using #8 seed beads in metallic colors.  I've been doing so much work with gemstone beads lately that I had forgotten how much quicker it is to work with seed beads. Hurray for big holes.  So it went quicker and, while still big, it was a better size.  But I found I couldn't get the stiffness I needed using fireline.  It needed to be monofilament.  But as I thought about starting over once again, I thought, wait a minute, I've been making open cubes like this for years--using RAW.  And while I like the sort of organic look of the rounded corners and all, RAW would be SO MUCH EASIER.  One of the things that had gotten me started on the whole project was that when I was trying to make these corners, back in my sampler, I had made one that, while I didn't like it as a plain corner, would be a great structure for morphing into  the long tube structure I wanted for the the pendant.  But I came up with a way to make an "organic" looking connection in RAW from the cube to the chain, and now I'm on my way.  But what a long way around!