Origami idea

Before I start the main part of this post, I'd like to tell you that I just updated to a new web page.  The address is still emiliepritchard.com, but the content and layout are new.  Check it out.  I'd love any comments.

This post is about another idea I've had kicking around in the back of my mind for ages.  I finally tried it and with interesting results, but they don't lend themselves to a piece I want to make right now.  So I'm memorializing it here for later reference.  The inspiration--and actually more than inspiration because it's more or less the actual design is a fountain done by Ruth Asawa that's origami done in stainless steel.  It's in San Francisco.  I've looked at it for a while, but only recently realized that all the triangles in it are right triangles.  Actually that makes sense, because it has to come from a flat sheet of, in this case, steel.  I reproduced the triangles in tubes and got picture 2.  Actually I made one change--I changed each pair of 2 smaller right triangles that are on the edges of the sheet to a single double sized one.  But, of course, this isn't origami, and there's no way to make the flat "sheet" of tubes stay "folded.
Then you get picture 2, which is pretty much like the origami structure and stays folded.  But the outside shapes are rectangles, and tube rectangles aren't rigid, so in picture 3 I made a pyramid out of each rectangle, and that makes it firm.
  There's one way my structure has an advantage over origami, in that I can adjust the lengths of my tubes to vary the structures.  Mainly I found that by shortening or lengthening the tube that is at the very center of each unit in the flat sheet, you change the angle of the curve.  A longer tube in that position gives you a tighter curve, and a shorter tube there gives a shallower curve, or, at some point, no curve at all.  So you could make a nice oval shaped necklace by varying the curve.

More Asawa inspired work

I'm still playing around with shapes that overlap/intersect one another.  I thought I'd try black(ish) and white so that you could see the intersection better.  The white beads are mother of pearl; the black are jungle jasper in the top one and black silkstone in the bottom one.  Neither is quite finished as I ran out of mother of pearl beads and I'm waiting for more.  In the top piece there's a continuous black tube that goes sometimes inside of and sometimes outside of a continuous white tube.  In the bottom there are 4 "pod" shapes with pointy ends that overlap, and tubes on each end that overlap the last pod.  An interesting project.  The design limitation is you have to arrange them so that the circles where the 2 shapes interlock have to all be 6-bead circles, because a smaller circle won't let a bead pass through the middle.  If I had beads that were slightly oval shaped, so that a bead would pass through a 5-bead circle, I'd have more flexibility.  Also, it makes for a pretty rigid structure.  I'd thought I could make a whole necklace of interlocked pods, but it just doesn't curve enough.  As it turns out, it would also be pretty heavy.

Ruth Asawa again

Here's my second pendant based on Ruth Asawa's interlocking shapes, spheres at the bottom and sort of fluttery cones half way up.  These are stone beads, mother of pearl for most of it, and African jade blending into blue sodalite for the colored part.  I was really pleased with it.  Doing it was an exercise in not doing too much. The long stretch of mother of pearl tube was repetitious.  When I do a long repetitious part, I have a tendency to add things, out of boredom, that are often better left out.  Several times on this piece I started to do extra things to "jazz it up" a bit, like stripes of blue beads to break up the long stretch of white, and things like that.  I ended up ripping them all out and keeping it simple, and I think it was right.  The only change I ended up making from the original 2-color design was to blend in the blue beads at the end of the green stalk, and I do like that.  Less is more.

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.