I've been playing around with the different shapes I can get in octahedrons. I started thinking about how I don't get a firm shape using RAW with tube beads because a square isn't rigid the way a triangle is. But on the other hand right angles are just so "freindly" to work with. We're surrounded by them, and we know how they work. So I started imagining octahedrons (octs)that were more or less square in overall shape. I wanted the piece to be not too deep, i.e. not sticking up too far off the body (as lots of my pieces do). So with a relatively flat oct I could just use Pythagorus to figure out how long to make the "waist" beads--here the gold beads-- so that you'd have a right triangle, and that would make a square shaped oct. The cross-wise and length-wise tubes are 20mm long, so a 28mm gold tube would be about right. Actually, though, I decided to use 25mm cold tubes instead, so the octs aren't quite square, but zigzag a bit. Partly that was because I thought a bit of a zigzag was more interesting, and partly because I prefer using more or less stock lengths rather than cutting tubes just for a single design. If I use stock lengths (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25mm), I have more flexibility in the design. If I cut custom pieces ahead of time, I have to have it all figured out before I do it, and I like to sort of make it up as I go along, even if I have the general idea figured out at the start. Also there would be lots of times that I would cut lots of, say 28mm tubes and then discover that to get the right curve, I really needed them to be 27.5 or 29mm or whatever.
Here, when I got to the back and needed to make it curve, I had to use shorter tubes on the inside triangles than on the outside ones. The ideal length for the inside tubes would have been around 18mm, so I just alternated between 15mm tubes in 1 oct and 20mm ones in the next. One of these days I'd like to skip the curve and do a piece that would look sort of like a tic-tac-toe grid.
