New structures

I entered this piece (and 1 other) in the latest Bridges math art gallery (http://gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/2021-joint-mathematics-meetings). The exhibit included explanations by the artists of each piece, and it's amazing how explaining your ideas makes you think about them more clearly.  As I said in the explanation this bowl is basically half of an icosidodecahedron, which is made up of pentagons separated by triangles.  I can't make a simple pentagon with my tubes, as 5 tubes joined together with thread will be shapeless.  So I made 5 tets that share a central tube as a hub.  I'll call them pods.  These pods are relatively flat, but if they were thicker, I wouldn't actually need the central tube.  That got me thinking about the fact that without that central tube it would be easy to stellate the structure.  Also that you could do that with 6 sided pods, or, for that matter, any-sided ones. With that idea, I could recreate those interesting structures that I learned from thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com and that I made using round beads. What fun!

These 3 pieces are what I did first.  The top one is a truncated tet.  The second is a dodecahedron. And the 3rd is a truncated oct.  In each case the actual structure is done in gold filled tubes, and the rest is done in oxidized sterling ones.  I didn't truncate the triangular faces because they're rigid without it.  I wasn't sure if I'd have to stellate the square faces in the 3rd piece (they would stellate into octahedrons). I didn't, and the piece seemed pretty firm as is, so I guess it was OK, although technically I probably should have.  I was pretty careful
 not to stellate them too sharply, as you can have a real probem getting

your needle down into the valleys of a piece with tall stellations.  I did

some stellated pieces back when I was working with seed beads and nearly drove myself crazy that way.

   Once I had made the 3 pieces, the question was what to do with them.  I had decided on some sort of wall piece, as they're too big for jewelry. My plan was to make a straight truss out of octs and hang them from it side by side.  But the top piece, the trucdated tet, is smaller than the rest, so I couldn't seem to make an arrangement I liked.  Eventually I decided to  hang them in a single row, and the smaller shape looks fine that way. 

One last thing I wanted to do:  the icosidodecahedron I had started out

to do in the first place.  It was going to take a lot of tube length, so I didn't want to do it in silver and gold fill.  I found a source for really inexpensive brass tubes in Istanbul (via etsy) so I made it in brass. I stellated more that the others because I knew the triangles separating the pentagons would allow me to get my needle in without a problem.  What I found was that in that case the limit on how steep you want your stellations to be is that if they're too steep that outside point becomes subject to not holding its shape tightly.

stars

On my recent boat trip, I was playing around with  some new ideas.  One of them was stellations.  I made an ornament by making an icosahedron and stellating it by turning each triangle into a tetrahedron.  I liked it, but as it was almost 3" in diameter it wasn't very practical as jewelry.  Then something occurred to me. The icosahedron at the center of it was made up of groups of 5 triangles that formed pentagons coming to a point at the center.  If I took one of those groups of triangles, and made it point inward instead of outward, I'd have a flat side that could lay against the body.  Then I could stellate all the rest of the triangles.  Voila!  Of course, these star forms still extend out quite a ways from the body, but I kind of like that.  I also made a few where the 5 tetrahedrons at the center of the star are made from shorter tubes, and so don't stick out so far, but for the big necklace I decided to stick with the long tubes.

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.

Stellated bowl 2

Just finished another bowl in my series based on the stellated icohedral form I showed a couple of posts ago. This one is more like the sphere, in that the stellations reflect the colors on the inside. I liked that better. The fact that the bowl curves back in at the top gives it firmness, but again makes it harder to see the colors on the inside. A tradeoff. If I made it larger before curving back in I could probably get both the firmness and the good view of the inside, but the thought of making it even bigger is somewhat daunting. This one took forever. It's around 8" in diameter, and 4.5" tall. I must admit I do like it alot, though.

Stellated vessel

Continuing on my stellated object series. I wanted to do a vessel, and this is my 1st one. I'm already scheming my next. When I stellated the sphere I showed in earlier posts, the most disappointing part was that you could no longer see the actual sphere very well. A vessel solves that problem. In this one I used cubes with sides of 2 beads for the actual vessel, but cubes of 1 bead sides for the stellation. That way you can see the vessel better through the stellation, as well as being able to see into it from the top. On the other hand I sort of miss those big fat stellations. Also, the interweaving of the stellations was more apparent in the sphere because of using several colors. Here I used several colors on the vessel itself, but only the darkish blue for the outside.
When I first did it, I just did the rows of stellated triangles, but it seemed to just stop at the top. It seemed to need a finish of some sort for the to edge. So I added a final row that is geometrically quite different, but brings some of the lighter inside colors to the outside and creates a sort of rim. I like that better.
As you can guess, this sort of piece is pretty time consuming. I don't think I would have the patience if I were using the smaller beads that most beaders do. I've come to realize lately that alot of what I do is related to my use of larger, #8 beads. For example someone mentioned that she didn't like using monofilament nylon because it meant doing it without a needle. I can use a needle, because the holes of #8s are big enough that I can do several passes and still pull a needle and 2 thicknesses of monofilament through. Once in a while I'll have to unthread and poke a single strand of monofilament through on the last pass, but not often. And I can use an easy-to-thread, big hole needle, which makes things faster for me. I sometimes miss the color selection that you get with #11s, but there would just be too many things I'd have to rethink if I were to change now.
One more thing just occurred to me--Since I've been talking about size I ought to mention that the size of this vessel is around 5" x5" x5"( it's not in front of me now, so I can't be exact).

Stellated sphere

I love how ideas just keep growing. My 2nd sphere (last post) was a firmer structure than the 1st one, but that enabled me to make it a bit bigger. The result was that while it was firmer, it still wasn't firm enough. If it sat for a while it would settle out of round just a bit. So I decided to stellate it, Something I've been wanting to do with a sphere anyway. Stellating means that each triangle on the original surface of the sphere becomes the base for a tetrahedron. It's not quite finished, which is why you see some monofilament floating in the picture, but I'm really pleased with the way it's coming out.
So you can get an idea of what it's like I should add that the diameter of the piece is around 5 1/2". Someone told me I should figure out a way to mount it on a base so that it could be a table light. It's probably too much engineering for me, but I do think it would be pretty great.