Unlearning what I've learned

  I'm pretty much a self-taught artist. Sometimes that means reinventing the wheel, and "figuring out" something that any teacher could have told me on day one. Still, I kind of like not knowing what the "you can't"s are. When I first started playing with beads, I was a rugweaver. Peyote stitch, which is often the first stitch people learn, seemed to me to be a way to make complex flat designs  I wasn't interested because I figured if I wanted to make a complex flat design I'd weave a rug. I wanted to do 3D stuff. Much later I learned about all the cool 3D things you can do with peyote ( like the contemporary geometric beadwork people do), but by then I was a long way down another path, and I still don't know peyote.
   I started out by reading an article in Ornament Magazine about David Chatt. I saw all the cool geometric things he was doing with right angle weave (RAW) and knew that was where I wanted to go. I got Valerie Hector's book, and from that learned to build a cube, a dodecahedron ( she calls it a Plato bead, and it

was a while before I knew that that was because it's a Platonic solid), and a truncated icosahedron ( Archimedes bead--same explanation).  That was pretty much it for my education, except for  the cool stuff I picked up from the beaded molecules blog.  Mostly I just played and learned
   This is a pretty long introduction to where I'm going here.  I started out, as most beaders do, using seed beads.  But as I got further into the geometry, I found that longer beads showed off the geometry better, and ended up using metal tubes.  I found that circles of 4, 5, 6 and even more beads worked great when using either seed beads or round stone beads. I didn't much like circles of 3 round beads because so much thread showed, although I used those on occasion. On the other hand, with tubes, just the opposite was true--triangles, which is what "circles" of 3 tubes became-- were great because a triangle is inherently rigid, but any larger circle was floppy and didn't maintain its shape. That meant no RAW with tube beads.  The first picture is a floppy necklace done in RAW with tube beads.
   Then I discovered that if I used a stiff thread, like monofilament nylon, it reduced the floppiness a lot. The shape still moved, and you couldn't build really complex structures, but for simple cubic RAW I liked it.  In particular I liked the way a piece could move, while still holding its shape.  Picture 2 shows one of these necklaces.
    But a couple of days ago, I was at the crafthaus website (http://crafthaus.ning.com) and that first picture scrolled by in the photo section. I hadn't looked at it in a long time, and I found I rather liked  the uber-floppiness of it.  It was on old picture from back when I was using oxidized copper tubes instead of the ox-silver ones I use now. And the copper tubes had a thicker wall which didn't leave room for several passes of monofilament, so I always used fireline. You can see that in the narrower parts of the necklace, toward the back, I used  a triangle cross-section for stiffness, and I still do that in my newer necklaces like picture 2. But I may have to do some more playing around with the  softer version of these necklaces.

Cubic super RAW

     I did 2 different structures trying to "cubify" Gwen Fisher's super RAW.  I didn't have access to the her blog as I was doing them, which is good, because It turned out that neither is the structure she used.  I wanted to keep the octagon in alternating colors that her flat version has.  What I ended up with is according to my handy wikipedia list of Archimedean solids, a truncated cube (i.e.a cube with the corners cut off to form triangles at the corners)  I did a single version and a double.  One thing I remembered about Gwen's version, though, is that it had hexagons at the corners, and this one has triangles.  So I tried again.  That's picture #3, and in the Archimedean solids it's a truncated cuboctahedron.  The funny thing is that it's actually the same bead I did several posts ago, and I called it Gwen's bead, because O it's relationship with something that I can't now remember.  I'll have to go back to those posts and look, but meanwhile I seem to have arrived at the same bead, approaching from 2 different directions.
    It was the different arrangements of the colors that made me not initially recognise the structure I saw.  Similarly it was the different color arrangements that made me not recognise the structure that Gwen had actually made for her CSRAW  (maybe we should call it super cubic right angle weave, because SCRAW is alot more pronounceable than CSRAW).  Anyway her structure is a truncated octahedron, which is one of my favorite shapes because you can incorporate a round(ish) structure with RAW.  I usually do it in a single color, and so I didn't recognise it.
   It occurs to me that one reason I usually do structures in a single color dates back to my learning to weave them.  I learned both the Plato bead (dodecahedron) and Archimedes bead (truncated icosahedron) from Valerie Hector's book.  I had, of course, no idea at the time how the names Plato and Archimedes were related to the shapes.  Anyway, the Archimedes bead took me a while and I had to do it in 2 colors in order to keep track of what I was doing.  I felt like it was a personal milestone when I got to where I could keep track of it without the "crutch" of 2 colors.  Now I'm starting to realize that the color arrangements can enhance the pieces.  Hmm...some rethinking may be in order.

One of my favorite uses of the truncated octahedron (clearly we need a shorter name) is, in fact, analogous to what Gwen's molecule did in her last post.  It's a series of necklaces that I call my Garland series.  This is my favorite of them.  It's the interesting angles as which the RAW sections come off the spheres that makes them interesting.
 
  

Platonic pingpong balls

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.