Since there's not a lot happening just now by way of sales (galleries mostly closed, shows cancelled) I've been spending some time redoing some older pieces. Sometimes there'll be a piece that I almost like but something seems a bit wrong. Often it takes me a while to decide just what it is that I don't like, or, once I figure that out, how best to fix it. Sometimes it just takes a small tweak and sometimes a major redo. Here is one of each:
When I made this pendant I had just figured out the square and circle (hexagon actually) shapes, and I've used them several times since. So I liked the shapes, but I didn't quite like the shape of the pendant--too wide and flat, sticking out way beyond the chain.
One of the recurring problems I have is that I make individual units, often not knowing just how I'll arrange them till after I've made several. Then when I've decided I have to attach some sort of rings in the proper places as attachment points. I could do this easily with open rings, i.e. ones that aren't welded shut. But since I have thread at each joint, my worry is that a thread will find its way through the inevitable space where the 2 ends of the ring meet. So I always want a closed ring. But a closed ring has to be put in place as you're building the structure, and you often don't know where you'll want the
join to be. In the first iteration I joined the shapes by putting a pair of tetrahedrons between them. But that meant I had to join them at the places where the edge of the shape was a crosswise tube, not a point. And that made the overall shape of the piece so long and wide. For the second version I came up with a way to join a point on the square to a crosswise tube on each circle and I like that better.
The second redo was a complete rethinking. I've always liked the colored piece shown first. But it had some problems. The colored tubes, which are anodised aluminum, are quite a bit bigger in diameter than the silver ones, and I've always felt that those bigger openings at the end of each tube were a problem. Early on, my solution was to put a seed bead at the end of each tube and treat the bead-tube-bead as a single unit. However, that triples the joints, and creates that many more places where if the thread tension is just a bit off the piece gets looser. In general that method tends to make the structure much less firm.This piece has been around for a few years, and there were starting to be places where you could see thread between ajacent beads in a way I didn't like.The other problem is the structure puts a lot of "stuff" at the back of your neck. I used to be quite rigid about maintaining a structure all the way around the back, which can make them harder to wear, especially when, as here, the structure is relatively wide and flat. A rounder shape going around the back works better.
The problem I had, though, is is that without the seed beads at each end,the colored tubes were too short to make octs that wouldn't zigzag, and I wanted them to run straight. And I can no longer get those aluminum tubes, so I couldn't cut longer ones. I could have cut a whole set of silver tubes in custom lengths to make the existing colored tubes work. Instead I redid the whole thing in RAW and eliminated the color. While I was at it I made the arrow heads more pronounced, added an extra arrow, and made the necklace one unit narrower and the back more wearable. I like it a lot, but I still miss the color, and I'm working on a way to do the new design in octahedrons with color. More on that later.
