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.
