EP Originals

New stellate vessel

2012-01-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

I've done another stellate vessel form. For this one I wanted there to be a clear distinction between the vessel on the inside and the stellations on the outside. In other ones there has been a difference, but not a major one, e.g. red and clear stellations on a plain red section of the bowl. But here I wanted the underlying bowl to be clearly differentiated, as it is.
I'm also playing with a new camera, that can, for one thing, make bigger files. With my old camera, it was very hard to take pictures of something as small as an earring, because I had to stay a foot away for it to focus, and then I couldn't crop away all the extra background and still have a picture big enough for jury shots. I'm still trying to decide between spending $ on a camera and associated gear and paying for professional photography for jury shots. Can't decide if I can really get the photography good enough to be competitive in highly juried shows.

more scarves

2012-01-17T14:04:00.000-08:00

I'm still having fun weaving scarves. At first this sort of weaving seemed a bit boring, since you can't do much designing as you weave, the way you can with my shaft-switched rugs. But now I'm finding that the color interactions are really interesting. When you weave a rug, the weft totally covers the warp, so there's only the color of the wefts to think about. But in these scarves, as in most weaving, you can see both warp and weft, so they contribute together to the final color. These 3 scarves were all woven on the same warp. it was wide stripes of reds, oranges, golds etc, alternating with marrow stripes of blues & greens. Different colors of weft made for interesting changes in the look of the scarves.

Some Scarves

2011-12-29T10:25:00.001-08:00

I've taken a bit of a break from my rugweaving to weave some scarves. In some ways it's less interesting than the rugweaving, as the possibilities for designing are much more limited by the threading pattern that you set up before you start to weave. But sometimes it's nice to make something relatively small and quick. Actually I've been trying off and on for a while to come up with a way of making scarves that was both fast enough that I could sell them at a reasonable price, and yet interesting enough that I would be proud of them. This is the first set of scarves that sort of hit that sweet spot, so I think I'll make some more and have a small display of them in my rug booth in shows I do this spring.

Flower necklace

2011-12-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

I was pretty pleased with this piece. I love these metal beads. the piece is based on some of the work in the Japanese site that is referenced in the beaded molecules blog. It's http://horibe.jp/Gr2F.HTM, and has lots of cool stuff. I actually intended to more or less copy a shape that's in it, except to change it by turning 2 of the bump-outs into cylindrical chains that would be the actual necklace. Actually I ended up making a slightly different structure, because I started from a torus with a larger inner diameter than theirs. After several false starts I ended up making a plain torus so that I could look at it to figure where and how to make the bumpouts on the second one. I'm working on another one where the symmetry will be broken up by having bumpouts of different lengths and configurations.

doing too much

2011-11-11T15:07:00.001-08:00

This is about design. What I wanted was to take something symmetrical,in this case a 3-sided lozenge sort of shape, and pile up a bunch of them to create a necklace that was less buttoned down than symmetrical shapes tend to be. So far so good, and I like the way the idea turned out. But you're looking at 2 versions of the design. The first one has extra lozenges in the main structure, as well as the ones hung from it. Bad idea! I'm drawn to techniques (beadweaving and loom weaving) that require alot of relatively monotonous repetition to get a completed piece. Because of that I have to watch my tendency to throw in something extra, mostly out of boredom. I've done that on rugs too. Here, I went back and tore out the extra lozenges, because they just distracted, in my opinion, from the central design. I like version 2 much better. Maybe someday I'll learn.

more ruffly things

2011-10-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

The first image (actually they're switched and it's the 2nd) was my first hyperbolic plane. It starts with 1 heptagon in the middle. The second layer puts 7 heptagons around it. The 3rd layer is 22 heptagons around. The 4th layer would have been 56 heptagons, but after I had done some of it I took it out, because, as I said in the earlier post, the piece was sticking out too far from the body for a pendant. It was nicely ruffly however.
I can't quite figure out the math for why the progression is 1,7,22,56. The first 2 numbers are obvious, but then it got wierd. I keep thinking maybe there's a stray octagon or hexagon somewhere, which would screw up the counting, but if there is I haven't found it. Another possibility just occurred to me. Maybe I just counted wrong, and the 3rd number is 21. It gets really hard to keep track of which layer is which, and it seems like they should all be multiples of 7. Oh,well...
The 2nd picture is the ruffle that starts with a tube and gradually flares out till it gets ruffly. This came from reading about all the crocheted coral reef forms. I loved how the engineers were trying to create the ruffles by scotchtaping bits of graph paper around in a spiral, adding 1-1-1-2 (you can change the algorithm by varying the number of 1s between each 2) and it was really cumbersome. Then one of the female engineers realized you could do the same thing with crochet stitches, and it would be far easier, and would represent it better too. I used a ladder stitch instead of crocheting. As I remember, some of the forms are 1112 and some are 112 (these start to ruffle faster and go really crazy really quickly).
Anyway, I like these, and someday I'll get around to doing something with them, but I probably won't make any more, as they take a loooong time.

hyperbolic plane

2011-10-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in a while, but experimentation goes on. This is a piece based on the hyperbolic plane. If you tile with hexagons, you, of course, get a flat plane. But if you tile with heptagons, you get a hyperbolic plane, which gets rufflier and rufflier as you move outward, like some heads of cabbage. The first one I did was round. I intended it to be a focal piece for a pendant, but it sort of got too 3-dimensional too fast (i.e. it stuck out too far from the wearer's body). I'll try to get a picture of it up in a day or so, but I don't have one now. Anyway I decided I wanted it long and narrow instead, so it would get ruffly, but not TOO ruffly. You could also do this using circles of 7 beads for the heptagons, but I wanted more "there" there, so I made my heptagons out of 7 triangles.
There's another way to get a ruffly structure that starts with a tube instead of a plane (maybe a hyperbolic cylinder? I actually have no idea what I'm talking about here). It comes out looking sort of like a petunia. I made a few of these quite a while ago, and liked them, but never quite figured out what to do with them. I think they should probably be the ends of a sort of a rope necklace, but have never made it. I'll try to get a picture of these too. They're much less open than these plane structures, so they took a long time to do.

new rug

2011-08-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

This is the other thing I've been working on recently. It's related, in design, to the one in blues and purples with black and white that I showed a couple of posts ago. That one has small black and white areas along the top left and lower right edges of the S. I wanted to expand those areas and create a space that would separate the foreground S from the background. My original plan was to do this in black and white like the other rug, but at the last moment I decided to make the rug much more muted by using tan and green instead of black and white. I like it, although I'm still partial to the older rug.

Stellated bowl 2

2011-08-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Just finished another bowl in my series based on the stellated icohedral form I showed a couple of posts ago. This one is more like the sphere, in that the stellations reflect the colors on the inside. I liked that better. The fact that the bowl curves back in at the top gives it firmness, but again makes it harder to see the colors on the inside. A tradeoff. If I made it larger before curving back in I could probably get both the firmness and the good view of the inside, but the thought of making it even bigger is somewhat daunting. This one took forever. It's around 8" in diameter, and 4.5" tall. I must admit I do like it alot, though.

tetrahedron in tetrahedron

2011-07-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

Back to geometric beadwork. I started this tetrahedron piece a while ago and sort of bogged down in the middle of weaving it. But I really like it now that it's done. I have 2 pictures because it's hard to capture the 3 dimensionalness in a picture (at least with my level of skill at photography). The problem is that the last thing you do is add the little lilac seed beads along the edges and that does alot to firm up the structure because it is a straight piece of monofilament running down each edge. So all the time you're making it it's way too floppy, and there's no way to know till you're done whether it is going to firm up enough to make the whole piece work. I had made a considerably smaller version, but, of course, as you get bigger, you tend to get floppier. Fortunately it did firm up quite nicely, and made a good piece.
I ought to add that the beads are around 15mm long, and the large tetrahedron is around 7" on a side, although it isn't in front of me now, so I can't measure it.

rug designing

2011-07-15T14:52:00.001-07:00

Designing with color is so much fun! Last year I did a big dying sequence and got a whole rainbow of colors, which I blogged about at the time. That resulted in 2 rugs, the 1st 2 you see here (also blogged about before). From the really enthusiastic response I got (and, I must admit, from the quick sale of both rugs too) I decided to do another rainbow dying. This one was a bit different, in that my yarn wasn't natural white, but sort of honey colored. On the other hand, in the earlier dying I had cut my colors with a bit of brown or black in each dye stock to keep the colors just a bit muted, so this time I did more or less similar colors, but without the brown dye since the yarn already had a bit of brown. After 2 days of dying I had pretty much what I had planned on.
I decided the first rug would be similar to the blue/purple/black/white one I did a few years ago(#3 pictured above), which I thought was a really great rug. Only instead of the colors just shifting from blue to plum, the outside would go from yellow to blue, and the center figure would go from yellow to red.
That was the plan. But as I looked at the yarn hanging on the fence to dry, I kept being drawn to the blue-turquoise-green tones. This morning I changed the whole plan to one that's much more muted, in those tones plus the honey yarn that I still have alot of. No pictures yet, but I'll post a picture when it's done.

Stellated vessel

2011-06-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my stellated object series. I wanted to do a vessel, and this is my 1st one. I'm already scheming my next. When I stellated the sphere I showed in earlier posts, the most disappointing part was that you could no longer see the actual sphere very well. A vessel solves that problem. In this one I used cubes with sides of 2 beads for the actual vessel, but cubes of 1 bead sides for the stellation. That way you can see the vessel better through the stellation, as well as being able to see into it from the top. On the other hand I sort of miss those big fat stellations. Also, the interweaving of the stellations was more apparent in the sphere because of using several colors. Here I used several colors on the vessel itself, but only the darkish blue for the outside.
When I first did it, I just did the rows of stellated triangles, but it seemed to just stop at the top. It seemed to need a finish of some sort for the to edge. So I added a final row that is geometrically quite different, but brings some of the lighter inside colors to the outside and creates a sort of rim. I like that better.
As you can guess, this sort of piece is pretty time consuming. I don't think I would have the patience if I were using the smaller beads that most beaders do. I've come to realize lately that alot of what I do is related to my use of larger, #8 beads. For example someone mentioned that she didn't like using monofilament nylon because it meant doing it without a needle. I can use a needle, because the holes of #8s are big enough that I can do several passes and still pull a needle and 2 thicknesses of monofilament through. Once in a while I'll have to unthread and poke a single strand of monofilament through on the last pass, but not often. And I can use an easy-to-thread, big hole needle, which makes things faster for me. I sometimes miss the color selection that you get with #11s, but there would just be too many things I'd have to rethink if I were to change now.
One more thing just occurred to me--Since I've been talking about size I ought to mention that the size of this vessel is around 5" x5" x5"( it's not in front of me now, so I can't be exact).

Stellated sphere

2011-05-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

I love how ideas just keep growing. My 2nd sphere (last post) was a firmer structure than the 1st one, but that enabled me to make it a bit bigger. The result was that while it was firmer, it still wasn't firm enough. If it sat for a while it would settle out of round just a bit. So I decided to stellate it, Something I've been wanting to do with a sphere anyway. Stellating means that each triangle on the original surface of the sphere becomes the base for a tetrahedron. It's not quite finished, which is why you see some monofilament floating in the picture, but I'm really pleased with the way it's coming out.
So you can get an idea of what it's like I should add that the diameter of the piece is around 5 1/2". Someone told me I should figure out a way to mount it on a base so that it could be a table light. It's probably too much engineering for me, but I do think it would be pretty great.

Another Icosahedron

2011-04-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Here's another of my spheres that I call offset icosahedrons. It's a bit bigger, 3.5" in diameter, where the 1st one was around 3". Also I made the change I was talking about earlier. The end faces (8 beads) of each strip of cubes is a side face in one of the other, different colored strips, so they share a whole face. Each strip is added on to the adjoining ones as if the whole thing were a flat piece. It's just when you pull 5 strips together into a pentagon that you force a curve into the shape. Doing it this way made the piece firmer, so I could make it bigger. Each strip of cubes is 8 cubes long, where the other sphere used strips of 6 cubes.
One thing I forgot to mention that worked out really well, in both balls, was that I found that if I used 5 colors I could arrange them so that I never had 2 of the same color next to one another.
Seems like now I have to do something asymmetrical. Every time I try to work my way out of symmetry, I find myself coming back to it. Actually I like symmetry too, and I think you probably have to work out the symmetry of a structure before you can play around with it, and do something asymmetrical.

Offset Icosahedron

2011-04-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

I figured out a way to firm up my new sphere, and while I was at it, took a better picture. I've added a #6 bead between each face of each pentagon (i.e. 5 beads in each pentagon). They're a bit hard to see because they're matte black, but with those there I can run a thread around each pentagon and pull it tight, firming things up alot.
I tried to reply to some of your comments on the piece, but once again my computer won't let me post a comment, even on my own blog. I'm pretty sure it's linked to changes in settings that my husband made in an attempt to avoid the new paywall at the New York Times, so we probably deserve what we get, but If I can remember how I fixed the problem before, I'll take care of it. Meanwhile, someone asked about what beads and thread I use. I use almost exclusively #8 beads, and that is what this piece is made of. I think it was Gwen who suggested adding some #15 beads, but I confess I don't own any, and I suspect I never will. I don't even use #11s. Life's too short. For thread I mostly use monofilament nylon fishing line for the extra body it gives a piece.I sometimes use Fireline, though, mostly with stone beads because the holes are smaller on them. This piece uses the monofilament.

Offset Icosohedron

2011-04-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a new piece that I owe to Gwen Fisher, although indirectly. On her blog there's a link to lots of mathematical art from the Bridges exhibits. I was amazed by the spherical pieces by George Hart. At the very bottom of the page on http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/sculpture.html there's a piece that's alot simpler than all the rest, and it was the basis for this piece. It's based on the icosahedron, but instead of each set of 5 triangles meeting at a point, they're offset so they meet at a pentagon. Only problem is that it's a bit too soft, but I've already figured out how to make the next one firmer. In the pentagonal areas, each side shares only 1 edge (2 beads) with the adjoining side. In the next one they'll share an edge (8 beads) and that will firm it up. Also when I made the first section, and made it 6 squares long, I had no idea what the size of the sphere it would generate would be. I think I'd like it to be a bit bigger. This one is around the size of a tennis ball. Of course, in beading, the bigger it is the more it tends toward squishiness, so I hope the added size doesn't undo the gains I get from changing the structure.

Pythagorus pendant

2011-04-09T11:46:00.001-07:00

Great comment,Gwen, about adding the cube in the middle to indicate the right angle. The thought had crossed my mind, but I was afraid of detracting too much from the jewelry side in favor of the math side. But based on the comment I decided to try it, and I kind of like it. Thanks.

2011-04-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

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.

flower links

2011-01-22T12:46:00.000-08:00

I've been having great fun with my "embellished" links. lately. This one was a big step for me in a way. Up to now I've been fairly subdued, and fairly limited in my color palette in the beadwork. This is just the opposite of what I've been doing in my rugs. The reason, mostly, has been that for the rugs I can dye my own colors and so create whatever I want. When I first started beadwork, I'd go online and pick, say, 4 colors for a piece I wanted to make. But when they arrived, they'd always be not quite what I had pictured. Either I'd feel like 1 or 2 didn't work at all, or 2 of them would be almost indistinguishable from each other. So I got in the habit of de-emphasizing color. That was good because it forced me to concentrate on the forms.
I took a crafts design course at the local community college a while ago and the teacher, a metalsmith and jeweler, told a story that stuck with me. She was working with another jeweler, who asked her what she could do to take her work to the next level. Pat (the teacher) said "Make some pieces without stones." She said "But I love working with stones." Pat said she knew that, but her work was too dependant on the stones, and if she worked without stones for a while, her other skills would get better, so that when she put the stones back in, the work would be stronger. I immediately thought "Damn, I'd have to leave out color." I was thinking mostly about rugweaving then, so I thought about making a series of black and white or neutral rugs, but I couldn't make myself do it.
So my problems finding the colors I wanted forced me to do just the sort of thing the teacher was talking about. Meanwhile one gradually acquires alot of colors of beads. I really like the pieces in the muted and metallic tones. And they can be worn with lots of things, which is good. But it was really fun to put lots of color back in the work. My favorite beadworker is Yael Krakowski(if you don't know her work, check out yaelkrakowski.com) and I love her use of color. This piece has a somewhat similar feel, I think. Anyway, I'm pleased with it.

new rug

2010-12-26T14:58:00.001-08:00

Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. I thought I'd do a post about a rug I finished a few weeks ago. I've been doing lots of these striped pieces lately (in fact I've just finished another one but don't have a picture yet. One thing that makes this one interesting is that it uses the same color progressions as the one I posted about a few months ago (September post), but in an entirely different way. The other one had a very regular progression--6" of red followed by 6" of red'orange, followed by 6" of orange and so on. It's the additon of the black design that makes it interesting. This one has just the color progression, but having the 2 sets of stripes alternating with each other and 2 colors in each stripe allows me to actually have 4 different color progressions going at the same time. It's kind of like a round in music. That makes me have to have a pattern that's very simple, and here it's continuous just like the color progressions. I've found, at the couple of shows this fall where I've shown my rugs, that I seem to get more compliments on the earlier one, but, while I like them both, I think this one is my personal favorite.

2010-12-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

There's a better picture of my fullerene necklace on my etsy site at http://www.etsy.com/listing/64265906/red-and-green-tubes-necklace. I meant to put it in the blog, but discovered I hadn't saved it properly at the time I did the earlier blog post.

fullerene jewelry and structures

2010-12-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

Wow--The Japanese site with the fullerene structures has me off and running again. Alot of it is really cool but too big to work as jewelry (I'm tending to do this kind of work with 4 mm beads. Possibly with smaller beads...). I've come up with a structure, that you see in my green "jack" (as in ball and jacks) structure that is a bit smaller than what I see on the chemists' sites. Maybe it doesn't work as a carbon structure (I, of course, have no idea), but it creates a smaller tube and still has things coming off at right angles, which I find is a good structure to work with. Basically it's a tube that is 4 hexagons around. Theirs tend to be 5,6 or 8 around. Now to turn it into a jewelry form.
I've also included a picture of a "fullerene style" necklace I did recently. I've learned a bit since then, and there are a few things I'd do just a bit differently, but still I think it came out pretty well. One thing I've learned since I did this is that the chemists ussually form their tubes so that the hexagons have a straight edge paralleling the tube, but not one at right angles to it. I did the opposite on this one. I think you get a stiffer tube if you do it their way.
Anyway, I'm still scheming things, learning alot and having great fun. Are any of you who read this making structures like this?

2010-12-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

More ping pong ball work. I was disappointed that my necklace form didn't get into the art to wear show. But after looking at it for a while, I decided that it was a bit plain. I made it with a continuous thread (yarn) just as you would in normal beading. By contrast, on most of my earlier pieces I had used short pieces of yarn that were tied together between each ball. This made for lots of color and texture to break up the balls. The problem was that I had made several pieces that involved 5-bead and 6-bead circles. When you make those sort of circles the beads pack close together and you don't really have room for a knot between each one. I managed to pull it off in the dodecahedron that's pictured, but when I tried a buckyball it wasn't firm enough and wanted to sag out of round. But, as any beader knows, when you make a circle of 3 or 4 beads you can see much more thread between the beads. That means you have room to put a knot between the beads for interest. So that's what I did for my wreath form, which is a variation on right angle weave, and so uses circles of 3 or 4 balls. I'll probably redo my buckyball with a continuous thread, and just add short bits of yarn to the finished sphere at the intersections so as not to compromise the structure. Who would have thought there was so much to learn from ping pong balls.

ping pong necklace

2010-11-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

I thought since this piece is all about scale, it would make sense to add a picture of it on me, so I got my son to take this. Terrible picture, but it does the job.

ping pong ball necklace

2010-11-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

I've had a fun day. A few weeks ago Florida Craftsmen sent out a call to artists for an Art to Wear show with a theme of unusual materials. Seemed like time to break out the ping pong balls. Most of the pieces I've made so far have been just 1 bead/ball thick, because otherwise the size seemed overwhelming. But that has meant that they were verging on not being firm enough. I did make one basket form that was thicker (made from ball tetrahedrons) and I thought it was a bit too thick for its overall size. I don't think it's on this blog, but if you want to take a look it's in my etsy shop--eporiginals.etsy.com. Now I'm rethinking and I plan trying to add on to the outside to make the overall size more in line with the thickness.
Anyway, for the necklace, I knew I wanted it to be an actual 3-dimensional structure. I started making a string of RAW cubes, but that was really too big, so I switched to triangular sections, and liked that better. I tried other types of line, looking for something with a bit more bling, to make it seem like jewelry. Ultimately, I went back to the rug wool, though. It's really ideal, as it has enough cross section to fill up the holes in the balls (I drill 7/64" holes through the balls on a drill press) and yet it will compress to let me get multiple passes through a ball to create the structures. Also it's hairy enough that it creates friction so the thing doesn't loosen up if I don't keep it under tension.
After I got the main oval done I spent a long time figuring out now to embellish it on the bottom to make it more jewelry-ish. I tried adding some sparkly eyelash type thread, but they didn't fit with the scale. Then I tried it again with other colors of wool and still wasn't happy. Finally I came up with the dangly structure hanging from the center, and I really liked that. It's so very jewelry-ish to have a dangly thing hanging down, and yet the scale matches the rest of the necklace.
Anyway, I submitted it, and I really like it, although once again my family thinks I've lost my mind. I should mention that in the prospectus they had a great picture of a necklace made out of lego blocks, so I'm not totally out of their realm. And it was great fun, whether I get in the show or not.

Asymmetry

2010-09-26T08:58:00.001-07:00

I'm working again with symmetry and asymmetry. I got some long black beads, and wanted to make a big chunky black necklace. My plan was a simple chain of octahedrons, mostly end to end, but with hard corners to create the circle you need for a necklace. It was the picture on the left (sorry for the blurry image). I was almost ready start working on the clasp, and I liked the piece alot. Just the size and blackness gave it enough drama, I thought. Then I got talking with a friend (thank you, Connie), and she told me how much she liked my asymmetrical work, so I started playing with the piece in front of a mirror. I ended up lengthening one side alot to the the piece on the left, and I think it's a big improvement. I'm still playing with the clasp a little, which is why you may see some monofilament in the picture.

2010-09-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

I've just finished a book I really liked--Conversations with Frank Gehry. I've never thought of myself as a big Frank Gehry fan; I'm a bit too buttoned down for some of his work. In fact I've attached a picture of my latest necklace, which illustrates my buttoned-down-ness pretty well. But the book made me take another look and I found that I really liked alot of his buildings, particularly the somewhat more restrained ones. He told about his creative process and how his ideas unfold that was really interesting, and relates to all sorts of creative work. I've just put the Frank Gehry documentary on my Netflix queue, so I'll be seeing some more of the same.

new rug

2010-09-02T19:14:00.001-07:00

I thought since I'd posted my dyed wool yarn, I'd post the rug that I wove from it. I thought the colors came out great, and the design was kept simple so as not to get in the way of the colors. I have enough yarn left for 1 or 2 more rugs using this color progression.

seed beads

2010-08-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

I've sort of surprised myself by going back to doing alot of seed bead work. 6 months or so ago, I was doing lots of pieces using long beads--copper, glass, and stone ones. I liked that alot, and I'm still doing it. I particularly like it because the long beads show the geometry of the structures better than seed beads do. But I've gotten bothered by how much you're at the mercy of just what beads you can find. For example, I did several pieces using a mix of copper oval and tube beads. I was working on another when I got my next shipment from Fire Mountain Gems. This time the oval beads, which are listed as 4x9 mm, were noticeably smaller, and with a much smaller hole, making it hard to make the many passes through the hole that are sometimes needed. The earlier beads were actually longer than 9mm, and these were less than 9mm. Probably the earlier ones would round down to 9 mm and the new ones would round up to that, but they were clearly different. This isn't a criticism of Fire Mountain Gems, it's just that it messed me up. Other people sell 4x9 copper ovals, but there's no way of knowing if they're more like the earlier ones or the later ones. I had to take apart an unfinished necklace, so that I could mix up the larger and smaller beads so as to make the difference unnoticeable (actually, I still haven't finished the piece). Anyway, it irked me to be so dependant on the materials. As another example, I've done quite a bit with some glass tube beads around 14 mm long. I've gotten them from shipwreck. Now they're on sale, and I wonder if my source is about to dry up. You can always find seed beads, and RAW and similar weaves are endlessly variable. Anyway, some seed bead ideas have been percolating while I was working with the larger beads, so now I'm back to the little ones.

dying yarn

2010-08-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't talked much so far about my rugweaving. My rugs are all about color. More so than the beadwork, because with my wool yarn I can dye my own colors. Last week I did one of my larger dye runs. It started with a page that I clipped out of the Company Store catalog quite a while ago. It showed cotton blankets in a range of colors. I liked that the colors were lively, but still a bit muted. The orange is sort of a spice color, the red is softened, etc. I've done alot of rugs with color progressions, but usually over a smaller range, e.g.yellow to blue or red to yellow. This time I went all the way from red to yellow to blue. I added a few colors to the ones in the catalog picture and changed the value of the colors to get darker hues on the ends and yellow in the middle. Also in the blanket colors there was a big gap between orange and yellow. I added a yellow-orange (the 3rd skein in the picture), but that's still the biggest gap in the series, I think. I dyed 2 lb of each, which will give me enough for around 3 rugs, since I'll partner the colors with a neutral. The 1st rug is on the loom now, and I'm using black with the colors.
in order to do the run I created 3 dyestocks, A blue muted with black, a yellow muted with brown and a red muted with some of the yellow and blue stocks. Then I could create the gradual progressing by putting successively more of one stock and less of the next one so that I worked my way around the color wheel. I still have some red and some blue left, so if I want I could complete the "circle" by dying wome purple yarn, but for the moment I'm leaving it as is.

Asymmetry

2010-08-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to do get away from strict symmetry in my beadwork. The links pieces were 1 step toward that goal; this is another. In general my beadwork using copper beads has been my most rigidly symmetrical. I've been trying to create a look reminiscent of bridge trusses or other engineered structures like that. Here I took a big step away from that. The indiividual structures are, in fact, octahedrons, but I made them using a combination of long and short tubes. Each individual unit still has a sort of symmetry, but by joining them together in different ways as I go along, I've created a random look that I like. Then since the structure is so open I've attached other geometric structures to it. They create interest. Also, I find these copper tube bead necklaces are pretty light and need a bit of weight added in order to hang well. The glass bead structures give it that.

Torus bracelet

2010-07-31T14:23:00.001-07:00

A new torus structure--this one with a small minor diameter (width of the tube), but a major diameter big enough to be used as a bracelet. In order to figure this one out I had to switch from building the inner circumference of the torus and working outward, as they do in the blog. Instead, I built a short section of the tube, and then kept extending it till I had the overall length, then closed off the circle. One problem is that it's not very easily adjustable for different wrist sizes. You could vary the length (the size you need to get the bracelet over your wrist) by adding another section, but that would add more than an inch. You could, I think, make one section shorter, or longer than the others, if you weren't hung up on symmetry, as I tend to be way too much.

comments

2010-07-31T14:20:00.000-07:00

A quick post about my comments problem. I find it's linked to my security settings, since I can comment from my son's computer. My husband tends to get a bit carried away on security settings, so I may have to list the blogs I follow as trusted sited to solve the problem. Anyway, it should be fixed soon.

comments

2010-07-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

A quick note--I think I've mentioned that I have trouble commenting on other people's blogs. Now I find that there are some I can comment on and others I can't. One of the ones where I can't is my own. If someone comments on an entry of mine, especially something nice, I like to respond, but I can't. I hope you'll understand.
Actually maybe someone can help me, since the people who follow my blog also follow others that I use. On some blogs (the beaded molecules and wild wicked beads are 2) when I go to the comment section the blog already knows who I am (assuming I've already signed into blogger). On others, (my own and beadorigami are 2) the site asks for a profile and when I say google account it just asks again and I'm in a loop. Anyone know what the difference is?

My background

2010-07-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd say a bit about how I got to where I am in my work. I've been a weaver for more than 25 years, and for the last 15 or so, I've done exclusively rugs. With those my emphasis is on color. I dye my own wool yarn, and put alot of effort into creating interesting color combinations. The work is very geometric because a) weaving lends itself to geometrics, and b) I have no skill whatsoever at representation. Can't draw to save my soul (although practicing drawing to reach at least a minimal competency is on my to-do list). Around 5 years ago we moved the rug loom out of the house and into a studio. I seem to suffer from "restless finger syndrome" so I was ready for a new outlet at the house. I ran across an article about David Chatt in Ornament Magazine, and knew that if I were to do beadwork, the kind of geometric right-angle-weave that he did was where I wanted to be. Valerie Hector's book had a good section on RAW, so I picked it up. The RAW section and Laura Shea's section on Plato and Archimedes beads are the genisis of just about eveything I do.
I've found that beadwork and rugweaving mesh well for me. With the rugs I have, of course, been limited to 2 dimensions, so I immediately went very 3 dimensional with the beadwork, and found that to be quite exciting. On the other hand, I no longer had control over my colors, and that was very frustrating. Not only can I not create my colors, as I do with my handdyed wool, I can't quite tell what I'm getting when I order, because the actual beads often aren't the same color as the colors on my computer monitor. I use #8 beads, and, of course, there isn't the range of colors I'd have if I used smaller beads. But, maybe because I came to beading relatively late, I find I don't have the patience for the teeny beads. And ultimately, I think the color limitations have been good for me, because they've forced me to rely less on color and more on form. Anyway, I go back and forth between media, and am having a great time doing it.
One of the dangers of blogging is the tendency to be way too self-indulgent, and assume the world is way more interested in you than they have any real reason to be, so I'll stop now.

Simplicity versus complexity

2010-07-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with the idea of how much is enough. My work tends to be relatively minimalist. So I'm always dealing with the notion of when simple and clean-lined edges toward boring. I made a piece recently where I thought the geometric structure was kind of neat, but the resulting necklace was relatively boring. I'm not showing that piece here, but it led me to think about the possibility of using some of my clean geometric structures as a scaffolding to build on. One of my first realizations of this idea was in my "links" series. It's a series of necklaces and bracelets that are made of individual beaded links. In my initial ones the links were all the same shape (except for one long link in the back), just different colors. I really like those necklaces, but now I've also created several links that have some sort of interesting shape added to the standard link. The nice thing is that the wearer/customer can decide how much to move away from the original simplicity by adding the more elaborate links. Also you can experiment with putting a "special" link in the center for a relatively symmetrical look, or off-center to create asymmetry. I'm enjoying this, and I like rearranging the necklaces and trying new looks.

Platonic pingpong balls

2010-07-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

This was a fun piece. I really enjoy working with the pingpong balls, although my husband thinks I've really gone over the edge. But scale matters, and sometimes I just want to make something bigger. Also I like the combination of the white balls and my many colors of rug wool.
Here's the idea on this one. The 5 structures are the 5 Platonic solids--tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. The 1st 3, since they are smaller, were made with 2 balls for each edge. The last 2 were done with single balls on each edge. It's interesting to notice that when you use round balls the placement of the balls appears just the same in the icosahedron and the dodecahedron, each using 30 balls arranged in triangles and pentagons. The difference is that the axis of each ball, and hence the placement of the tufts of yarn, is different (by 90 degrees). If I had used single balls instead of double, the same thing would have been true of the cube and octahedron, each of which would use 12 balls. I've found I've sometimes made mistakes in analysing other people's beaded shapes for that reason. There's a mathematical term, I think, for the relatonship between the shapes that are like that, but I've forgotten it. Unfortunately my mathematics comes either from high school 40+ years ago, or from Wikipedia.
Back to the piece in the picture. Plato is said to have associated the Platonic solids with the Platonic elements, so I used that in choosing the colors for the structures. The cube, since it is a stable, building blockish sort of shape, is associated with earth, so I used neutrals and gray greens. The tetrahedron, because it's the pointiest shape, is linked with fire, so I used red/orange/yellow. The icosahedron, because its round shape allows it to flow, is matched with water. Hence watery colors. And the octahedron (and all of a sudden I've forgotten the reason) is associated with air, so I used white, for relative invisibility next to the white balls. There's a mismatch, of course. 5 Platonic solids and only 4 Platonic elements. He speculated that the 5th solid, the dodecahedron, might be related to the shape of the universe. So I used all colors in it.

Torus necklace

2010-07-18T11:19:00.001-07:00

This is the first actual piece of jewelry I've made from my torus structures. I like it because it's the first time I've varied from the actual structures I found in the beaded molecules blog. The 6-sided torus is basically taken from the blog. It's the one that uses octagons in the middle and squares on the outside, and it wants to be a hexagon type torus,i.e. the structure creates a 60 degree angle between the sides. However I found I could force it into a 90 degree bend, to create the square torus. As a general matter, I find I like forcing my beaded structures into shapes that aren't exactly what they want to do, because the forcing creates a stiffer structure. An example would be a tetrahedron created using right angle weave. It makes a somewhat rounded, but stiffer, tetrahedron.
When I tried to force the structure even farther, into a 120 degree bend to make the triangular torus in the middle, it just wouldn't go. I simply didn't have enough beads in the outer part of the torus to accomodate the greater diameter. So I changed the squares (4-bead circles) to rectangles (6-bead ovals) and then I could make it work.

Sierpinski spheres

2010-07-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

This is a bit more on my Sierpinski-ish structures. The blue ball I showed before isn't a Sierpinski one because the small units are dodecahedrons and the overall ball is a buckyball. You could, of course make each of the small ball units buckyballs, but that would take more work than I wanted to do. I did try to go the other way and use small dodecahedron balls as units to make a large dodecahedron. I couldn't do it. The small goldish hemisphere was my attempt. The problem is that 5 dodecahedrons don't really want to make a circle. I don't know enough trig (or, for that matter any trig) to know what the angles are, but when you make it you have to pull it together some to get a circle out of 5 spheres. It wants to be 5 and some fraction spheres. You can do it fine for the first (bottom) circle, and the 5 circles that adjoin it, but after that it's too far off. The only way I could create that sort of structure was to link the adjoining balls with a small 5-sided "tube" of beads to give me a little wiggle room. That's the red and black structure, red dodecahedrons joined together by black tubes. Some of the tubes, as needed, have 2-bead edges on the inside and 3-bead ones on the outside. On the blue buckyball from the earlier post, the 5-ball circles are separated by 6-ball circles, and that gives you the same sort of wiggle room.
When I had done the red and black structure, I found that I actually liked the look of separating the small balls, so I did the same with a buckyball, the multicolored one. I really like the fact that it's a more open structure, and you can see what's happening better. Also it's larger (around 4" diameter.

60 ball sphere

2010-07-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

The blue ball shown here is, I think, my most geometrically interesting piece. It's not exactly a Sierpinski structure, but heading in that direction. The individual spheres are dodecahedrons, and the overall structure is a buckyball. It differs from the one in the beaded molecule blog, though, in that the small spheres are not strung together to form the large sphere. Instead, the adjoining small spheres share a face, just as cubes do in right angle weave. In order to make this work I had to change the buckeyball. Where the beads in a beaded buckyball usually represent the edges of the ball (so there are 90) in this structure they represent the vertices, so there are 60. In terms of the carbon-60 structure, I suppose that would mean they represent the carbon atoms, instead of the links between the atoms. Again, I'm not a chemist, so I'm more or less guessing, but that seems logical to me.
The other 2 pictures are earlier attempts to make the sphere. In each case I got sidetracked when I got partway through. I found that I didn't want to close up the sphere, but I wanted the inside to show. For the first one I just added long fringe to the open edge. For the 2nd one I added another row of 6-ball circles to give it more height, and then added some balls on the outer edge to make a lip. I think they're prettier that the sphere, but I did want to make one actual sphere, so the 3rd time around I completed it.

triangle structures

2010-07-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to upload some images of some of the donut (technically torus) structures I've built based on the incredible carbon nanotube stuff in thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com. The larger picture used seed beads, and to create more open structure I used 2 beads for each edge. It's around 3" in diameter. Looking through all the structures in the blog, I've been trying various versions. For jewelry I'm trying to keep the minor diameter (ie the diameter of the curved tube, not of the whole torus) relatively small so the piece isn't too terribly thick. Also I want the very outermost part of be a row of shapes,not a border between rows of shapes. That way, when I get beyond single toruses (tori?) I can build a structure to link together a series of them. The other picis of various structures using 4 mm stone beads. I sort of like the blue one on the left best, as it's quite firm and not too thick, but it doesn't have a bead circle on the outer rim. If I connect to a bead circle it will slightly on the back of the torus. So I'm still playing.

2010-06-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm just starting this blog, so let me say a few things to start out. First of all, I don't know much of anything about blogs, so if I violate any blogger etiquette, chalk it up to ignorance and let me know I've goofed. That reminds me, I don't know if you can comment under my current setup, although I hope so, and I'll try to figure that out soon. I follow just a few blogs myself, but for some reason, I can't get the comment feature to work when I try to comment. I write a comment, give them my google account, but I just get into a loop where when I try to post the comment it asks for my profile again and the whole thing starts over. If anyone can help me with this problem, I'd appreciate it. Also, I'm a reasonable speller, but a terrible typist, so, while I try to catch typos, some are sure to get through.
Something about me and what I'm trying to do. I'm a rugweaver and a beadweaver. Rugweaving came first ( I've been doing that for 15 years or so) so my main website address is www.EPRugweaver.com. It also has some of my beadwork. I also have a shop on etsy, and since it includes beadwork and rugs ( mostly beadwork for now) I call it EPOriginals.etsy.com, like this blog. In both my rug work and my beadwork I'm heavily geometric. With the rugs, my primary emphasis is on color, and that works well because I dye my own wool. When I began doing beadweaving, I found that A. it was really fun to play with geometry in 3 dimensions instead of 2, and B. it was really irritating to be limited to the colors I could find in the marketplace, especially since the beads that would arrive in the mail never quite seemed to match the colors I had seen on my monitor. Both of those led me to sort of de-emphasize color and concentrate on form in the beadwork ( although I still like working with color there too).
In this blog, I'm hoping to talk about my work and what I'm trying to accomplish. Although I want/need to sell what I make, I' m going to try to keep away from just a sort of "Here's my newest etsy listing", or "here's where I'll be showing my work next" kind of thing. I hope I'll show the experiments that didn't come out so well in addition to the ones that worked.
Well, that's it for now. I know I have to post some pictures, do some links and all that, but that will come soon enough. I'll just say that I'm having great fun just now doing beadwork based on my current favorite blog--beadedmolecules.blogspot.com. I think I got that URL right; anyway it's a chemist at the U. of Taipei who uses beads to make representations of carbon nanotubes. Amazing stuff! When I cna get some pictures up I'll show you some of mine. For now, I feel like I'm talking to myself, and I'll stop for now.

EP Originals

New stellate vessel

more scarves

Some Scarves

Flower necklace

doing too much

more ruffly things

hyperbolic plane

new rug

Stellated bowl 2

tetrahedron in tetrahedron

rug designing

Stellated vessel

Stellated sphere

Another Icosahedron

Offset Icosahedron

Offset Icosohedron

Pythagorus pendant

More links

flower links

new rug

fullerene jewelry and structures

ping pong necklace

ping pong ball necklace

Asymmetry

new rug

seed beads

dying yarn

Asymmetry

Torus bracelet

comments

comments

My background

Simplicity versus complexity

Platonic pingpong balls

Torus necklace

Sierpinski spheres

60 ball sphere

triangle structures