Funky scaffold

I think in my last post about beadwork, I said that since that piece was very controlled, I wanted to something funky next. Well, here it is. More and more, I've come to realize that I sort of have 2 distinct bodies of work, one very controlled, and one looser. I like them both, and they seem to resonate with different parts of me. I do the same with my rugs, although there I've moved more and more to the looser designs, with color families instead of single colors, and a more improvisational style. Partly as I get more confident with something, I loosen up a bit, although I still like the controlled pieces too. This necklace is a really simple right angle weave, done with oxidized copper tube beads. I used 2 different lengths of tubes, though, chosen mostly at random, which makes it asymmetrical, and gives it life (I think). I broke one of my rules with it though. I have come up with a general rule for my work that when I'm using round beads I generally create shapes out of polygons with at least 4 sides. I use triangles some, but generally I don't like the amount of thread that shows in a triangle. Mostly I use cubes, dodecahedrons, buckeyballs, etc. But with long beads, those sort of polygons don't hold their shape, so I stick to triangles, which are rigid. I mostly make things using tetrahedrons, octahedrons and sometimes icosahedrons, all of which are based on the triangle. This necklace is an exception to that rule, since most of it uses 4 sided shapes (I can't say squares because of the difference in the lengths of the tubes). If I had made it all with tubes of the same length, it would totally collapse. Because of the irregularity of the tube lengths, it can't quite collapse, and where it does collapse, it does so in interesting ways. At the back of the necklace, mostly to reduce the size, I changed it so that the cross-sections were triangles, and the sides were 4-sided, and it's a bit firmer there. Also at the bottom I added a second row with triangle cross-sections, both to create a focal area and to firm it up a bit. Still it's squishier than most of my work, but I kind of like the squishiness.

Stalactites rug

One of the fun things about the rugweaving structure I use is that the colors reverse on the back side. The design of my newest rug takes advantage of that to create a light side and a dark side of the rug. The darker side, where the reds and dark blues predominate, is the side I designed. On that side, the red sections get smaller as they go up, and they also get lighter as they go up, so you see more red and less pink. Same for the blues, which predominate at the top where they are dark and get smaller as they get lighter. On the back side the pinks and light blues predominate for the same reason. Either side can be the "right" side, depending on what works in your room.

triangles necklace

I thought that since I'd posted the early stages of the design of this piece, I ought to post the final product. Here it is. Once again simplicity and symmetry won out. To even things out, I'm working on a funkier piece next.

Linked triangles necklace

I thought I'd write something about how my designs evolve as I create them. I tend not to do alot of preliminary drawing or planning. I just have an idea and see how it works out as I make it. Not the most efficient method, as you can see here. I wanted a series of triangles made from nickel silver beads joined by metallic seed beads. The first time I started (I don't have a picture of this)the triangles were too close together, and I wanted a more open effect. The picture here is my second try. I got enough space between the triangles, but in doing so, it seemed to me that the colored seed beads sort of overwhelmed the triangles, and I had wanted the triangles to dominate. Also, I had intended to make the whole necklace a hexagon shape, using the way triangles tile to make the "corners". You can see one corner in the picture. But I found that you don't have much control over the size of the sides that way. That is, if 5 triangles is a bit too small for a side, you have to add 2 more triangles, which is an additional 2" or more, when maybe you just wanted another 1/2" or so. So I decided to make the circle by just making the hinges on the outside of the circle longer than the ones on the inside of the circle.

This is how it's looking so far, and I like it much better. At shows people always ask how long it took to make a piece. I hate that question. And often, I wonder whether I'm supposed to count just what they're looking at, or all the false starts that went into the designing of it.

more new earrings

More with my oxidized copper tubes. On the right is an earring that was one of my favorites until my wearing it turned it brown. It's just an octahedron, but when you use some long tubes and some short ones, you get interesting shapes. The one on the left is the new one with patinated copper tubes and little accent beads. You can see that the original one was just the tubes. I guess it's because of my own gray hair that I feel like the dark gray tubes won't show up enough without accent beads. I spent quite a while playing with the liver of sulphur today, and it's trickier that I thought at first. I have several necklaces that are gorgeous flame orange around the bottom and brown where they were next to my undoubtedly sweaty neck(this is Florida, after all). Most of them use melons as well as tubes. I found the melons gave the necklaces more weight, and so they hung better. With all the beads, I hadn't liked the new-penny-pink of the raw copper, and so I hit them with a propane torch to turn them darker. They turned a lovely orange. But now I realize that alot of what I was doing was burning off the lacquer they were coated in. When they started to go brown, I found the melons held their color better. Now I realize that was largely because their greater mass kept them from heating up as quickly as the tubes, so I didn't burn off all of the lacquer. I was hoping I could put a whole necklace in the liver of sulphur solution and just turn it gray. But the melons get mottled, instead of all gray. Eventually the L of S turns them all gray or black, but by that time the tubes have a black coating that comes off on your hands. Not good. More experimentation is in order.

Something new

These earrings represent 2 new things in my work--1 good, 1 REALLY BAD. I'll give you the bad part first. The little gold-ish beads are #11s. I know lots of you use #11, or even, God forbid, #15 beads, but I have been a firm believer in #8 beads, which probably seem big and clunky to hard core beaders, but have worked great for me. I never even bought #11s. So my whole system, the needles I use, the monofilament, everything is the way it is because I use #8s (or larger, if you count the gemstones and the long glass oval beads). And I like it that way. I want to do complex work. But don't think it's any more complex because the beads are ultra-tiny, instead of just tiny. And to me, coming from weaving rugs, where I measure my progress in square feet, #8 beads do seem tiny. But I needed those little circles of beads to be very small, especially since the tube beads, while long, are quite small in diameter, so I broke my rule. Oh well, just so I don't start making things entirely out of #11s, I guess I can cope. The other new thing is the tube beads. They're patinated copper. I've used copper beads, both tubes and melons, in lots of pieces, and I've really liked the very architectural effect. Some of the pieces look kind of like bridge trusses. But I found that after I wore them awhile, skin oils and, let's face it, sweat turned the lovely orange to brown. Not surprising when you look at the copper bottoms of pans. But for that reason I'd sort of stopped working with the copper, and I took the pieces off my website. I started thinking about silver, but, of course, that will tarnish too. So I started thinking about patinating the silver, so it would just be a permanent dark gray. I wandered around the web, looking at instructions and videos for patinating silver with liver of sulphur. But I found that liver of sulphur will also patinate copper dark gray. So why pay the price of silver when I can get the same look with copper? Also I can't find long straight tubes in silver. Everything I found that was around an inch long was either a curve or a spiral (the long copper beads I used are 22mm long and 1.5 mm diameter). a curve or spiral might be an interesting effect, and I know I'll try it sometime, but for now I really like what I got with the copper. The difference, I found, is that the silver seemed to stop at a fairly shiny dark gray, but the copper, if you left it in the solution too long went to totally matte black and just looked burned up. In the picture these earrings look black, but that's the fault of the photography; they're dark gray. When I made the jewelry using coppery looking copper I didn't use the tiny accent beads, but with the dark gray I felt I needed an accent color.

More shapes

Isn't geometry great? After making the bead I showed (badly) in the last post, I wanted to make more. The original one, which is the 1st one in both of these pictures, was based on the cuboctahedron, which has 24 edges. So I wanted to make some shapes based on solids with a fairly similar number of edges, so they could come out similar in size. The 2nd shape in the group is based on the truncated tetrahedron, which has 18 edges. I thought about doing a dodecahedron or icosahedron, but they both have 30 edges, so would be bigger than I thought I wanted. So I went to the list of Johnson solids (Hurray for wikipedia) and found more shapes. I especially like the last 2 that are dome shaped--they're called cupolas on the list--because I'm thinking of making a bracelet with several shapes linked together, and those give a flat side to have on the inside with the "dome" facing out. One of them is basically an icosahedron with the bottom 5 triangles cut off, so it has 25 edges. The smaller one has a hexagon on the bottom and 18 edges. I posted 2 pictures of the shapes so you could see them from the top as well as the side. One thing I've been meaning to do is put together a tutorial and see if anyone's interested in learning how to make one. I might do it with one of these shapes. I don't have a graphics type program, but would do it with lots of photos.

Gwen's bead

Sorry about the blurry image; no tripod handy. But I think you can see the structure OK. I call this one Gwen's bead, because it was inspired by the paper Gwen Fisher and Blake Mellor wrote about tiling theory and beading. It's in Gwen's blog at beadinfinitum.com. I have to admit I haven't finished reading the article, but I've looked at the diagrams and pictures in it. I particularly liked the hexagonal tiled figure in Fig 28 (on the left). The problem is that as I'm an active rugweaver, when I want to make complex flat patterns, I do it at my loom, and weave a rug. With the beadwork I want to work in 3 dimensions. I started out to turn the flat idea in figure 28 into a truncated octagon, as that's a shape I use alot. But when I realized how big it would get, I switched to a cuboctahedron. Seems like when you use that method in a solid figure, what you end up with is a sort of truncated cuboctahedron. Also it seemed like in the 3-dimensional figure the ratio of the 2 sorts of beads (I think Gwen has a name for them, but I'm too lazy to look it up just now) is different. My piece seems to have lots more silver beads in relation to the copper ones (I think the ratio was 96/32 or 3/1) than her flat figure had. I was also surprised at how firm it was; I was afraid it would be squishy. I'm not sure just what I'll do with the bead, but I like the lacy openness of it. Anyway it was a fun thing to work on.

Hamiltonian path

I'm so proud of this dodecahedron! If you're like me, and I know some of you are, you've made jillions of dodecahedra, so what's so special about this one? It was made using what the beaded molecule people call the Hamiltonian path, which means that each bead has only 2 passes of thread through it. (Actually don't look too closely at the picture, because I didn't take the time to photograph the actual one, but since I wanted a picture for the post I just used the photo from one of my dodecahedron earrings--but, trust me, I actually made the real thing.) I read about this Hamiltonian path on the blog a few days ago, and my first thought was "that's impossible". Since each bead is in 2 circles, I knew you'd need 2 passes, one for each circle. But you need a third pass to get your thread into position for the next circle. Today, while I was away from the computer, I was composing a comment to the blog, asking them to explain. I was going to say that I knew you'd have only 2 passes through each bead if each circle was a separate piece of thread. Also you could do the same using 1 thread for each 2 circles, by making figure 8s out of 2 circles and then joining them together. A few hours later, while I was doing something entirely unrelated, it occurred to me that if you could make a figure 8 (2 circles) you could extend that and make a 3 circle version. If that was so there must be a way to extend that to 12 circles in such a way as to have a dodecahedron. That led to much staring at diagrams of dodecahhedra, and eventually I figured it out. Actually it turns out that if you use the 2-needle technique--that is, a length of thread with a needle at each end--it's not hard to do. But it took me a while to realize that. I don't much like the 2-needle thing, because it makes it hard to maintain tension, but it simplifies things because you don't have to figure out a way to get the thread back to the beginning of the structure. Essentially you're bringing the beginning and end of the thread along with you. Anyway, I made it, and it was great mental exercise. Now I'll go back to making things the usual way. By the way, does anyone know who Hamilton was/is?

New bead shapes

I haven't posted much lately, but I've been working at the beadwork, trying to expand the vocabulary of shapes I can create. This is one, using a graduated set of diamond shapes in gemstone beads and graduated egg or oval shapes with the nickel silver beads. Obviously it's totally symmetrical. After doing that one, I did another, mixing up the shapes and colors a bit more. This is that one. I really like working with the stone beads, and putting that sort of color in the work. In one way, it's a pain because the holes are so much smaller than seed bead holes. But I like the soft colors alot.

geometric shapes

These 2 pieces have been on my mental drawing board for a while now. Finally made them. The green one is mostly about the stones, and the various greens. The other one is me starting to put together some of the shapes I've figured out. I like the look of the stone beads, but it sure is a pain to find the holes in them. Partly it's just that I need a better light, I think. It's OK for most things, but not for finding holes in beads. Black onyx are the worst!

Asymmetrical tube necklace

This is my newest tube necklace made from my nickel silver beads. I was pretty pleased with it. I had to work hard on it to push myself toward an asymmetrical design. I tore it apart several times till I got it where I wanted it. But in the course of it I learned alot about how to make the tubes do what you want them to do.