Asymmetrical silver tetrahedrons

Seems to me that I have a way of announcing in a blog post that I plan to do A and then immediately doing B.  Like I'll say I want to get away from symmetry and the next thing I know I've done 3 or 4 symmetrical pieces. Or vice versa. Just a few posts ago I said I wanted to make pieces using sort of stock lengths of tubing instead of cutting custom lengths for an individual piece, because if I get the geometry wrong, I'm left with odd length pieces that don't work and that could  produce a lot of waste. So what did I do next but make the most custom length piece I've made so far.  I'm sure there's a CAD-CAM program out there that could have figured out the proper lengths for me, but, of course, I don't have one.  For this one I drew the inside oval and the outside asymmetrical curve on graph paper, and then drew the triangles it would take to join them.  This gave me an approximation of the lengths I would need, but only that.  Beyond that it was pretty seat-of-the-pants. I've been mostly oxidizing my silver so I don't have to think about tarnish, but for this one I had no choice but to use bright silver, because I was cutting 2 or 3 lengths at a time, and there's no sensible way to oxidize the tubes that way. (If I were still working with copper, I could oxidize as I go, because copper doesn't need hot water to oxidize, but for silver you need very hot water, close to boiling.  I guess I could keep a liver of sulphur bath hot if I used a hot plate, but I just use a pot with a coil immersed in the water, so I can only heat plain water, and when it starts to cool I throw the bath out.) Also if I oxidized a tube and then had to shorten it a bit,I'd be left with 1 bright edge, and I'd have to oxidize it again.  Anyway, I like this one in bright silver anyway, so it worked out alright.  the longest tubes in it, by the way are 62 mm, or around 2.5" long.

sterling silver tubes

 Buying and cutting those colored aluminum tubes that I've talked about in the last few posts has started me off on a tear.  I've thought for a while about using oxidized sterling silver instead of oxidized copper, but was put off by having to cut the tubes myself.  At the same time I knew that there were things I couldn't do with the copper tube lengths I had, that I could do if I could control the length myself.  So as soon as I had worked a bit with the aluminum tubes, I found myself buying silver tubes and cutting them up too.
  As a practical matter, the price difference between copper and silver isn't so very great because the necklaces don't actually have that much metal in them. They're light as a feather.  In fact, that may be a problem in some pieces down the road.  On many of my copper pieces I used some 18mm melon shaped beads, mostly to add a little weight to make the piece hang better.  But those same beads in silver are pretty pricey because they have a lot of silver in them.  For now, the time it takes to cut and, more importantly, de-burr the cut tubes adds more to the cost of the work than the difference in metal prices.  And I think silver has more customer appeal than copper.
   The piece on top, with the tetrahelixes, was my first one with oxidized sterling.  I find it doesn't oxidize as dark as the copper does, at least using liver of sulphur.  There may be other chemicals that make it darker if I decide I want that.  For now this is OK.  I felt I needed seed beads at the ends of the aluminum tubes, so I used them at the ends of the
silver tubes too.  On the second piece, below, I used them just on the aluminum, not on the silver.  As I was cutting the silver, I found I was seduced by how pretty the bright silver was, so for the second piece, I left it bright (also the dark blue and purple show up better against the bright silver).  However, as a practical matter, I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to clean silver, so I think I'll mostly darken it.  I've looked at a lot of Flora Book's work with silver tubes, and it's so beautiful it tempts me to do more with bright silver. I'll just have to see as I go along.
  On the bottom piece you can see the advantage of cutting my own tubes.  It's a simple chain of octahedrons.  But a chain of octahedrons would normally form a straight line.  In order to get the curve you need for a necklace I had to make the triangle on the outside edge longer than the triangle on the inside edge.
Here's where some trig would have come in handy in figuring out just how much longer, but I managed to figure it out with "lesser" math, and it came out right.

Something new

These earrings represent 2 new things in my work--1 good, 1 REALLY BAD. I'll give you the bad part first. The little gold-ish beads are #11s. I know lots of you use #11, or even, God forbid, #15 beads, but I have been a firm believer in #8 beads, which probably seem big and clunky to hard core beaders, but have worked great for me. I never even bought #11s. So my whole system, the needles I use, the monofilament, everything is the way it is because I use #8s (or larger, if you count the gemstones and the long glass oval beads). And I like it that way. I want to do complex work. But don't think it's any more complex because the beads are ultra-tiny, instead of just tiny. And to me, coming from weaving rugs, where I measure my progress in square feet, #8 beads do seem tiny. But I needed those little circles of beads to be very small, especially since the tube beads, while long, are quite small in diameter, so I broke my rule. Oh well, just so I don't start making things entirely out of #11s, I guess I can cope. The other new thing is the tube beads. They're patinated copper. I've used copper beads, both tubes and melons, in lots of pieces, and I've really liked the very architectural effect. Some of the pieces look kind of like bridge trusses. But I found that after I wore them awhile, skin oils and, let's face it, sweat turned the lovely orange to brown. Not surprising when you look at the copper bottoms of pans. But for that reason I'd sort of stopped working with the copper, and I took the pieces off my website. I started thinking about silver, but, of course, that will tarnish too. So I started thinking about patinating the silver, so it would just be a permanent dark gray. I wandered around the web, looking at instructions and videos for patinating silver with liver of sulphur. But I found that liver of sulphur will also patinate copper dark gray. So why pay the price of silver when I can get the same look with copper? Also I can't find long straight tubes in silver. Everything I found that was around an inch long was either a curve or a spiral (the long copper beads I used are 22mm long and 1.5 mm diameter). a curve or spiral might be an interesting effect, and I know I'll try it sometime, but for now I really like what I got with the copper. The difference, I found, is that the silver seemed to stop at a fairly shiny dark gray, but the copper, if you left it in the solution too long went to totally matte black and just looked burned up. In the picture these earrings look black, but that's the fault of the photography; they're dark gray. When I made the jewelry using coppery looking copper I didn't use the tiny accent beads, but with the dark gray I felt I needed an accent color.