new webpage

Just a quick post.  As beadweaving has become as important a part of what I do as rugweaving, I've wanted to have a website that treated the 2 media equally.  So I've started emiliepritchard.com.  I'm still working on it, adding more pictures, captions and such, but it does basically what I want to do.  Check it out; I'd love your feedback, as it's still quite fluid.

Art Festival

Just a quick post.  No beadwork or weaving on this one.  I just wanted to say that, if anyone is in the Detroit area, I'll be showing my beadwork at the Arts, Beats and Eats festival in Royal Oak, MI on Labor Day weekend, i.e. this coming Friday thru Monday.  I've been working hard on getting good pieces ready for the show.  I'd love to talk to any of you who could come by.

more metal beads

    Just finished this one.  I went back to my oxidized copper beads, but I now have round ones as well as tube beads.  The round ones are a pain to use, though.  These are 3.5 mm.  The holes are quite small and hard to find.  But, more than this, since the beads are hollow, your needle goes in one side of the bead, and then has to feel its way around the wall on the other side till it finds the hole to get out.  Actually the same is true of the nickel silver beads (the bright ones in this piece), but their holes are much bigger in relation to the size of the beads.
    Despite the griping, I like the way this one came out.  I like the asymmetry, as well as the way the tube beads in the chain open the piece up.  And they do speed up the weaving, so I probably shouldn't complain about the time it took to make the major shapes out of the round beads.

Shapes

        I've been taking some time to try to expand my vocabulary of the shapes I can make using round gemstone beads.  These are 4 mm, mostly red aventurine, for no particular reason except that I had a lot of it.  I was interested in the idea of graduated sizes, so I came up with 4 sizes of disks, 3 of sort of teardrop shapes and a couple of  kind of lozenge-ish shapes.  The curvy pieces at the top left had to do with trying to make shapes that were not just convex (I think that's right, I sometimes get concave and convex mixed up, but anyway shapes that curved inward as well as outward).  I made a necklace using the graduated rounds.  Unfortunately, I hadn't figured out the 4th, largest, disk yet, so it just has 3 sizes.  That 4th size, by the way, is pretty big-- 2 1/2" in diameter (6.2ish cm).
     

Scaffold with gemstone shapes

  I've been wanting to combine gemstone beads with my oxidized copper scaffold structures.  The first one I did ( I don't have a picture of it) was quite a regular, repeating structure.  Also, it used just one kind of gemstone, and it was gray feldspar, so it didn't add a lot of color.  Anyway, nice, but I wanted something with more unpredictability to it.  This is what I came up with.  It uses red agate, red aventurine, green marble, blue quartz, yellow quartz and gray feldspar.  Also, no 2 scaffold structures are alike.  I think it's much more interesting.  I've never "strung" beads on a cord, so it is more complicated to incorporate the colored shapes with the oxidized copper, but I got it to work.

The trickiest shapes to use were the cubes.  Each gemstone shape has a tube bead running through it.  When I made my first cube (they're 2x2x2 cubes) I discovered the only way I could put a tube through it was like this:
The tube had to go through the middle of one of the rows of cubes, so it's offset on the total cube.  If the cube were 3x3x3 cubes there'd be a path down the middle, but that would be way too big.  But then it occurred to me that this cube, which is made of 54 beads, has just 2 running down each center axis.  So you could just leave out 2 beads, and you'd have one center axis that was free.    So I took it apart and left out 2 center beads, and got the one in the 2nd picture.  I couldn't figure  out a very effiicient path to build it without those 2 center beads, but anyway, I got it done.

Simplicity

   I just finished this piece, and I'm pleased with it.  It's so easy to get hung up on complexity, and I've been guilty of that too.  This piece relies on the color interaction betwen the black and white silkstone beads and the red agate.  Other than that it's simple--just buckyballs and a tube structure.  The only complexity was in making the tube curve at the top and bottom (it has too much stiffness to be able to take that sharp a curve by itself), and that doesn't have the appearance of complexity anyway.
   I  work with color a lot in my rugs, and I've always felt that that is one of the things I do reasonably well.  In the rugs, I dye my own colors, and that makes a huge difference.  When I first started beading, I was really frustrated because I couldn't just throw beads in a pot and make them any color I wanted.  So I sort of de-emphasized color, and did a lot of work in a fairly limited palette.   Then, more recently, I've started doing some seed bead pieces with more color, and have liked them.  But with the gemstone pieces, I've still been working in a fairly limited color range, partly because at the moment I'm still pretty cheap and don't buy the more expensive gemstone beads.  Also, I try to stay away from dyed gemstone beads.  I must confess that I have wondered about these red agate beads.  But Shipwreck Beads usually says when beads are dyed, and they don't list these as dyed, so I've been using them a lot.  They punch up a piece nicely.  I wish I could find a good blue too. I'm too cheap, at the moment, to buy lapis lazuli.  I bought blue sodalite once and made a piece that looked pretty nice, but I had so much trouble with the beads breaking that I ended up taking it apart, and I've never bought sodalite since.  Have any of you used sodalite, and what was your experience with it?  I'd love to think I just got a bad batch, but wherever those pretty white inclusions appeared, the bead broke there.  It was as if the white was just chalk.  Any ideas?

3 cube pendant

Since I wrote last time about the steps it took me to get to this design, I figured I ought to post the final product.  Quite simple, but I'm pleased with it.

Sampler

This is a piece I'm really proud of--even though it's not pretty, or something I can sell.  For a while now, I've been working on these tube pieces, and gradually finding what works and what doesn't.  The trouble is, I often try various ways to, for example, make a smooth curve, till I get what I want.  But some of the ones I didn't want might be a structure that's useful for something else--except that I've torn it out and after a while I can't remember how I did it.  So this is a sort of sampler.  In it I have several ways to make a 60, 120, and (most importantly) 90 degree turn.  The hardest was to make a corner, like you'd have if you were making an open cube.  The inside curve was easy, the the outside curve would either have a big knob on it, or be too flat and pull the inside out of its 90 degree-ness.  Anyway, I learned an enormous amount, and have generated lots of ideas for future pieces.

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.
 
  

New Links piece

With this piece I've gone back to my "links" series, creating separate links that can be joined together in any order. These are embellished with balls on stalks. One thing that is different in this one, and that I like, is that I used a black stem and toggle to contrast with the colored oval in each link. I considered using a colored ball at the end of each stem instead of a straight toggle, but then you can't take the links apart. Still, it would have looked nice, and blended in with the other balls on stalks. Hmmm... I'm thinking as I write, and that might be the next piece. I did that once before, with a gemstone links piece, and liked it. I don't think that piece is here on the blog anywhere, but it's on my website, eprugweaver.com/beadwork. I had to make one of the ovals open up (with a magnet clasp), since I couldn't take the links apart from one another.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I've been working pretty hard on my photography, and I thought this one came out pretty well.

Another scaffold

I'm really getting into these dark tube bead pieces. I've done several now, and I think this is my favorite. With the one I talked about in the last post, I was concerned that, because it was done mostly in right angle weave, it was a bit too floppy, because 4-sided figures are not rigid the way triangles are. In this one I modified it by using triangles for the cross-sections, but 4-sided figures otherwise. That way it still has lots of flex, but it can't collapse totally flat. I think one reason I like these pieces is that they avoid the tendency toward "preciousness" that I think is easy to fall into in beadwork. Using these beads, even if you do a symmetrical piece it's kind of ____, I can't think of the word exactly; not masculine, obviously, but not overly feminine and pretty. Anyway, it works for me.

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.

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 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?

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.

nanotube necklace

Here's another in my series of explorations of nanotube forms. It's quite symmetrical, and I'm now working on one that's asymmetrical, but both are based on my attempts to make tubes that curve and get bigger and smaller to create a design. I just read Cindy Holsclaw's post on her beadorigami blog about chiral forms in DNA, so I'll mention a bit about that. The beaded molecules blog shows chiral and achiral forms for their torus structures. Generally the chiral forms seem to make the smoothest curves, which I like the look of. However, unless I make a necklace long enough to fit over a person's head (which I'd like to do, but haven't) I need to be able to endcap the tube, or at least to have it end smoothly so that I can put in a clasp. That seems to require an achiral tube. I've also found that I can change the diameter of the tube as I go around a curve, for example I can go from a 6-hexagon circumference to a 5-hexagon one. If I try to do it on a straight section it sort of bumps in on one side, and doesn't look good.

Pinwheel pendant

I've been doing lots of work with the tube and torus structures, drawing on the ideas in the beaded molecules blog. I'm getting better at making tubes curve one way and another and making them get fatter and thinner. Great fun! This is my most complicated one so far. I'm using nickel silver beads, but I'd love to try some of these forms in sterling silver.