Redoing things

 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.

Developing an idea

 I've been making lots of pieces like the first one here: repeats of a structure like an oct, separated by biggish stone beads.  And I've varied it by using different structures, but always a repeat of the same one.  I've wanted to do 2 things--eliminate the beads and vary the structures.  Leaving out the beads means you don't have the color limitation, i. e. you're not limited to wearing it with an outfit that goes with red. There are 2 ways to do this.  One would be to put a closed ring between the octs (or whatever structures) Or they could interlink directly with one another.  Here I interlinked them. It means that you need to build more structures, as they overlap, but it makes the design tighter. I like this one, and I think pretty soon I'll make another one with the pentagonal shapes done in gold filled beads.
   As with most of my ideas, I start out being rigidly symmetrical, and then later I play with the idea in a freer, asymmetrical way.  Picture 3 shows me doing this design in that way.  I think its my best one so far.  I also think adding the gold makes the piece more interesting, without limiting the colors you can wear it with.  Now I'd like to extend that more asymmetrical, more random approach to some of my very structural pieces.

Design and color

 I've been thinking design thoughts lately.  Partly that's because one of the things I miss from my rugweaving days is working with color.  And partly because I've started adding some gold to my pieces and the price dictates that I get maximum impact for the colored (i.e. gold) tubes I use.
First conclusion I've reached--always subject to change--Where a piece has a really interesting shape, and particularly an interesting outline, like the first piece shown, it works quite well in just oxidized silver. I could add areas of color if I wanted, but I don't have to. This would apply to my charm pieces as well.  But where a piece is really regular some color helps to break things up, like in piece 2. And I tend to like having the color offset, not at the center of things.
The next issue--placing the color.  If I use a lot of colored tubes, I can do whatever I want and it will show well, but the problem arises when I don't want to use so many tubes.  My regular and mathematical mind wants to use them to highlight the geometry I've spent so much time creating.  But doing that usually means distributing a limited amount of color over the whole necklace, and sometimes it sort of loses it's impact. In the 3rd picture I have a piece where I think that spreading out the color really works.  You just wouldn't see how the arms of the pinwheel spiral without those gold tubes indicating it. But more often I think that massing it, as I did in the piece with red tubes, is a better bet.  I'd love to get others' opinions on this.  What do you think?

Some math, some design

 In some earlier posts, I've talked about some necklaces I've made out of octahedrons, where a long tube, often a colored aluminum one, acts as a hypotenuse to create octs that can stack in a way similar to the cubes in RAW.  This works well for necklaces, where it's nice to have the structures lying somewhat flat, but it doesn't work so well in a bracelet, where you would generally want them to stand up.  I needed a way to join 2 standing up octs so they'd be at an angle to each other.  After some trial and error, I  came up with a solution.  If I made an oct so that the triangle on the top used tubes that were half as long as the tubes on the bottom, I'd get an oct that if you looked at it from the top would look like one of the pictures
below, with the little triangle in the middle being the top of the oct and the bigger outside one being the bottom.  And the triangle "walls" that connected them would be perpendicular to the top and bottom ones ( actually there are  are 6 triangles connecting them and every other one is perpendicular.  If I used the pattern on the left to join 2 of my squarish octs, they'd be at right angles to one another; if I used the other, equilateral one they'd have a 60 degree angle.  That's what I used, and started to make the bracelet  shown below.  I was pleased

 with it from a structural standpoint, but it didn't seem to have enough color, and the aluminum tubes seemed to sort of get lost in all the dark sterling.  I decided that the problem was that the joining octs didn't have any colored tubes, and also that the colored tubes on the inside of the bracelet were kind of lost.  So I took it apart  and moved all the tubes to the outer wall of the bracelet, using them in both the squarish octs and the joining octs.  Both the bracekets are incomplete because I was gradually taking apart the first one to build the second one.  But I hope  they're complete enough that you can get the idea

of what they look like.

Engineering a piece

I thought I'd post something about the way I design a piece, which is a very slow, trial-and error process.  I've been doing more with my idea of a structure that goes back and forth between the hex-based structures for round beads and the triangle-based tube structures.  I've done several along the lines of the one in my last post, where the necklace is a chain of polyhedrons, going back and forth from stone shapes to tube ones. Here I wanted to vary that a bit, and create individual "links" that combined tubes and stone, and then join them together.  I started by creating the stone shape (what you see is actually the 3rd version).  At each end it has a triangle of 3 10mm tubes and that becomes the base for a tube octagon.  The problem, then, was to join the 2 octs together to form a round shape and then link those shapes together.   You can't join them with an octahedron, because in those the triangles on opposite sides point in opposite directions, whereas these both have their point on the bottom.  You could use a chain of 2 octs, but that would entail lots of short tubes, and I didn't think that was what I wanted.  So I simply joined them with 3 parallel tubes at the top ( that's the one on the left).  But all those parallels, as I should have known, allow lots of wobble--rectangles becoming parallelograms, etc.  In the one on the right I added 2 more parallels down at the bottom of the tube part, but still had the same problem.

    After some screwing around I realized that there was a way to make the structure out of 3 tube octahedrons.  If I changed the shape of the ones coming off of the stone form so that they touched each other, then you could have an oct in the middle because you wouldn't be attaching to triangles on opposite ends of it, but to triangles that meet at a vertex.  It makes the "donut hole" smaller than I wanted, but that's what I ended up with.  I think you can see that I've taken advantage of the flexibility in the stone part of the link.  The stone structures in the top and bottom pictures are the same, but in the bottom one they look longer and shallower than in the top one.
    Another issue is color.  I think it dates back to my rugweaving days, but I always tend to think that if 1 version of a color is good than 5 are that much better.  That is, If I'm using green stones, I want each iteration to use a different green.  In designing these stone-and-tube pieces, I've so far fought that urge.  For one thing, I think a piece looks less formal when it uses several colors than when all the stones "match."     Also I'm beginning to think that just because a piece of jewelry is necessarily small, at least compared to a rug, more cohesiveness might be good.  However, in this piece, just because the color brown is itself so neutral, I went back to my old ways and used several browns and brown-reds.

red tube necklace

Once I had my building blocks figured out, I couldn't stop beading till I had a necklace.  I think the color adds a lot in terms of defining the structure.  More to come, as I'm on a roll now.

colored tubes

   I just got my first shipment of colored (anodized aluminum) tubes, and I'm loving them.  I've been wanting to make some pieces that are quite open, as all my tube pieces are, but still have a bit more presence.  The aluminum tubes accomplish this in 2 ways.  First, obviously, they're red.  But also, they're fatter than the oxidized copper tubes.  The copper ones are 1.5 mm in diameter, and the aluminum ones are 1/16" which is almost 2mm.  Because the tubes are relatively big, I found I needed seed beads at the ends, as having 3 big raw tube ends at each point of 
a tetrahedron was unattractive.  I had used #11 beads at the ends of copper tubes in the past, but I thought that the fatter tubes might "want" a bigger bead.  So I tried it with #8s.  But I didn't quite like it so I tried #11 beads (this is all in the 1st picture) and I liked that better.  A #11 bead fits quite nicely into the hole in the red tube.
   Then I had to figure out how to combine the red tubes with the blackened copper ones.  When I cut up the 1st 1' tube, I got 14 beads, but they were just a hair shorter than the long copper ones.  So I thought I might put seed beads only on the ends of the red tubes, and not the black ones, and that would even things out.  I did that in the 1st tet in the 2nd picture, and it pretty much worked, in terms of making the sides even.  But I wasn't sure I liked it. so I did a second tet in which all the tubes had beads at the ends.  I liked that better, even though the lengths weren't quite right.  On my next 1' tube I lengthened the individual tubes just a bit and got just 13 tubes out of a foot, but the length was better. 
  Actually, I need to work on getting tubes of a consistent length.  The red ones were better than the gold filled ones I did a few weeks ago, and the last red tube I did was better than the first,  But they're still not as consistent as I'd like.  Rio Grande sells a tube cutter that you can set to a length, and that should improve both consistency and speed.  I want to play around with the lengths of the tubes, but it will be trial and error as to how a given length affects the geometry of a piece, and I can't do much trial and error without wasting beads, so that's a problem.  I imagine there are CAD type programs where you could  play with  polyhedra that have sides of various lengths, but I don't know what they would be.  The only other thing I can think of is to buy unanodized aluminum, which is really cheap ( something like $.35/ft) and play with those.  That, of course, is expensive in time.  Anyway, for now I'm having great fun with my new red tubes.

Oxidized copper and stones

Just finished a new piece.  I've been moving toward adding more color to my oxidized copper tube pieces, mostly with gemstones.  This is the latest.  I have a tendency to design for myself--i.e.something I would wear (or sometimes something I would wear if I lived a life that included dressing up, which I mostly don't).  That keeps the work relatively conservative.  This one is a bit bigger than I would tend to wear myself, but I like it a lot.  I think the mix of stone shapes based on molecular structures  and copper tube structures based more on engineering forms works well.  Particularly since it corresponds with the mix of color and no-color.
  I think my next step will be to combine the 2 kinds of beads more closely--like a polyhedron where some of the beads are round gemstones and some are copper tubes.  This is tricky because generally the long beads need structures made mostly of triangles, or else they're too floppy, and I tend to avoid triangles with the round beads.  That's partly because too much thread shows in a triangle made from 3 beads, and also because I like the more open look you get with bigger circles of beads.

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?

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.
 
  

Stalactites rug

One of the fun things about the rugweaving structure I use is that the colors reverse on the back side. The design of my newest rug takes advantage of that to create a light side and a dark side of the rug. The darker side, where the reds and dark blues predominate, is the side I designed. On that side, the red sections get smaller as they go up, and they also get lighter as they go up, so you see more red and less pink. Same for the blues, which predominate at the top where they are dark and get smaller as they get lighter. On the back side the pinks and light blues predominate for the same reason. Either side can be the "right" side, depending on what works in your room.

New bead shapes

I haven't posted much lately, but I've been working at the beadwork, trying to expand the vocabulary of shapes I can create. This is one, using a graduated set of diamond shapes in gemstone beads and graduated egg or oval shapes with the nickel silver beads. Obviously it's totally symmetrical. After doing that one, I did another, mixing up the shapes and colors a bit more. This is that one. I really like working with the stone beads, and putting that sort of color in the work. In one way, it's a pain because the holes are so much smaller than seed bead holes. But I like the soft colors alot.

New stellate vessel

I've done another stellate vessel form. For this one I wanted there to be a clear distinction between the vessel on the inside and the stellations on the outside. In other ones there has been a difference, but not a major one, e.g. red and clear stellations on a plain red section of the bowl. But here I wanted the underlying bowl to be clearly differentiated, as it is.
I'm also playing with a new camera, that can, for one thing, make bigger files. With my old camera, it was very hard to take pictures of something as small as an earring, because I had to stay a foot away for it to focus, and then I couldn't crop away all the extra background and still have a picture big enough for jury shots. I'm still trying to decide between spending $ on a camera and associated gear and paying for professional photography for jury shots. Can't decide if I can really get the photography good enough to be competitive in highly juried shows.

new rug

This is the other thing I've been working on recently. It's related, in design, to the one in blues and purples with black and white that I showed a couple of posts ago. That one has small black and white areas along the top left and lower right edges of the S. I wanted to expand those areas and create a space that would separate the foreground S from the background. My original plan was to do this in black and white like the other rug, but at the last moment I decided to make the rug much more muted by using tan and green instead of black and white. I like it, although I'm still partial to the older rug.

rug designing

Designing with color is so much fun! Last year I did a big dying sequence and got a whole rainbow of colors, which I blogged about at the time. That resulted in 2 rugs, the 1st 2 you see here (also blogged about before). From the really enthusiastic response I got (and, I must admit, from the quick sale of both rugs too) I decided to do another rainbow dying. This one was a bit different, in that my yarn wasn't natural white, but sort of honey colored. On the other hand, in the earlier dying I had cut my colors with a bit of brown or black in each dye stock to keep the colors just a bit muted, so this time I did more or less similar colors, but without the brown dye since the yarn already had a bit of brown. After 2 days of dying I had pretty much what I had planned on.
I decided the first rug would be similar to the blue/purple/black/white one I did a few years ago(#3 pictured above), which I thought was a really great rug. Only instead of the colors just shifting from blue to plum, the outside would go from yellow to blue, and the center figure would go from yellow to red.
That was the plan. But as I looked at the yarn hanging on the fence to dry, I kept being drawn to the blue-turquoise-green tones. This morning I changed the whole plan to one that's much more muted, in those tones plus the honey yarn that I still have alot of. No pictures yet, but I'll post a picture when it's done.

More links

This is a sort of follow up to my last post. I liked my "Flower links" piece, but after looking at it for a while, I realized that I had gone back to links that were all the same. They were embellished, but all the same way. As I tend toward simplicity and a sort of minimalism, I decided to just keep adding embellishments till I felt it was too busy. The nice thing about these modular links necklaces is you can keep changing a piece by making more links, so you don't have to do alot of ripping out.
First I added some links at the back with smaller "petals" (although I don't actually think of these as flowers, but just as geometric shapes), because I felt the necklace looked better photographed flat than it did when worn. I wanted it to sit closer to the neck in the back. Then I started adding on to some of the links in front. I've done 2 so far, and will probably do one more. I'm honestly not sure on this one which version I like best. In the first version you do get the color variation, and maybe that's enough. What do you think? I'd love feedback.
In the 2nd one I varied the links but went back to my more neutral colors. It creates a more severe look, which I actually like alot.

new rug

Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. I thought I'd do a post about a rug I finished a few weeks ago. I've been doing lots of these striped pieces lately (in fact I've just finished another one but don't have a picture yet. One thing that makes this one interesting is that it uses the same color progressions as the one I posted about a few months ago (September post), but in an entirely different way. The other one had a very regular progression--6" of red followed by 6" of red'orange, followed by 6" of orange and so on. It's the additon of the black design that makes it interesting. This one has just the color progression, but having the 2 sets of stripes alternating with each other and 2 colors in each stripe allows me to actually have 4 different color progressions going at the same time. It's kind of like a round in music. That makes me have to have a pattern that's very simple, and here it's continuous just like the color progressions. I've found, at the couple of shows this fall where I've shown my rugs, that I seem to get more compliments on the earlier one, but, while I like them both, I think this one is my personal favorite.

new rug

I thought since I'd posted my dyed wool yarn, I'd post the rug that I wove from it. I thought the colors came out great, and the design was kept simple so as not to get in the way of the colors. I have enough yarn left for 1 or 2 more rugs using this color progression.

dying yarn

I haven't talked much so far about my rugweaving. My rugs are all about color. More so than the beadwork, because with my wool yarn I can dye my own colors. Last week I did one of my larger dye runs. It started with a page that I clipped out of the Company Store catalog quite a while ago. It showed cotton blankets in a range of colors. I liked that the colors were lively, but still a bit muted. The orange is sort of a spice color, the red is softened, etc. I've done alot of rugs with color progressions, but usually over a smaller range, e.g.yellow to blue or red to yellow. This time I went all the way from red to yellow to blue. I added a few colors to the ones in the catalog picture and changed the value of the colors to get darker hues on the ends and yellow in the middle. Also in the blanket colors there was a big gap between orange and yellow. I added a yellow-orange (the 3rd skein in the picture), but that's still the biggest gap in the series, I think. I dyed 2 lb of each, which will give me enough for around 3 rugs, since I'll partner the colors with a neutral. The 1st rug is on the loom now, and I'm using black with the colors.
in order to do the run I created 3 dyestocks, A blue muted with black, a yellow muted with brown and a red muted with some of the yellow and blue stocks. Then I could create the gradual progressing by putting successively more of one stock and less of the next one so that I worked my way around the color wheel. I still have some red and some blue left, so if I want I could complete the "circle" by dying wome purple yarn, but for the moment I'm leaving it as is.