Asawa pendant

I've been thinking about Ruth Asawa and her work.  If you're not familiar with it, you can find it at ruthasawa.com.  She made gorgeous sculptural shapes out of knitted wire (although I keep seeing it described as crocheted, surely it's Viking knit).  Often there are spheres or cones interlocked with other spheres or cones.  That's what I wanted to play with.  It's made me realize, more than I had, how much geometry is in her work, to get smooth curves and progressions.  This was my first attempt at interlocked spheres.  I wish I could overlap them more, but since in my spheres there are fewer points of entry than in a knitted structure, there were limits to where I could make one sphere go inside another. For example, I couldn't pass through a 5-bead circle, because the hole in the middle isn't big enough to get a bead through it.  I had to just use the 6-bead circles. And if I had done my interlock through the next row of circles, the 2 green balls would have bumped into each other in the middle of the turquoise ball.  I have some ideas about getting around these problems, but that's for future work.  The 2 outer spheres are based on the 90 bead buckyball, but modified to "sprout" a tube at one end.  The 1 in the middle is a 120 bead sphere.  Following my usual path, now I'm working on another version that's a bit less symmetrical.

Stone teardrops

This is a piece I've had in the back of my head for a while.  I wanted to take the basic buckeyball shape and extend 1 end out to make a teardrop shape.  I got that worked out and then came up with a smaller version for the back of the necklace.  The trickiest part was getting 2 "stalk" to come out of 1 ball a
in fairly close proximity so that I could get it to form 2 strands at the bottom.  All in all, I think it worked out nicely.

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.

60 ball sphere

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.