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.