New scaffold with gold

I've just finished a scaffold piece with accent tubes of 14 kt gold.  Structurally it's similar to the one with blue and green accents below, with 2 exceptions.  Both are based on chains of tetrahedrons.  The sides are tetrahelices, but at the bottom I've massed larger groups of tetrahedrons.  They're based on the idea that 5 tets that share a single center edge, like a hub, will form a circle.  You can see such a group of 5 at the center bottom in each piece.  Trouble is it doesn't actually work.  For it to work exactly the angle between sides of a tet would have to be 72 degrees (I don't have a font that will write math symbols) so that 5 of them would add up to 360.  But it's actually around 70.5 degrees.  It would work if the hub tube were a little longer than the others.  But when you start extending

the structure as I've done at the bottom of the piece you can't do that because a tube that is a hub in one group is a spoke or rim in other groups.  So things don't quite work, and it gets worse the further you go. One of the reasons I've added small seed beads at the ends of each tube on the bottom piece is to add more "wiggle room".
    But a while ago my favorite blog, (thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com) showed a picture of the 8 possible convex deltahedrons ( ie convex shapes made exclusively from equilateral triangles) and one of them was essentially my 5 tet circle but without a hub tube at the center.  That got me thinking, and in the new piece I left out some of the hubs where I could.  Just leaving out 5 tubes made it fit together much better.
         The other change I made was where the necklace curves around your neck at the back.  You can take a tetrahelix and go off in a new direction that's about a 30 or 40 degree change (I've never measured it).  I did 2 such jogs in the bottom piece to get to the clasp.  It's fine, but I wasn't entirely happy with the sharpish corners that stick out.  So in the new piece I made the tetrahelix curve by simply shortening the inside tubes, and it makes a smoother finish.
        I'm really enjoying working with gold tubes.  I think the contrast with the dark silver accentuates the geometry nicely.  What I have to be careful about, though, is that the high cost of the gold tubing has a tendency to make me more conservative about what I make.Starting out, most of my gold pieces, like this one, are variations on designs that I already know I like.  But if it works, I'm sure I'll get braver.

another redo

 I didn't intend for these redos to become a "thing."  But I did another one and I was so pleased with the results I decided to post it.
This was not a case of not liking the original piece; I actually liked it a lot.  My intent when I made it was to use it as a jury shot, as it was rather big and dramatic.  But I absolutely could not get it to photograph well (and I took a million pics).  The top pic is the best I got, and the gold doesn't stand out against the black well at all.  Also, photographing it straight on like that you don't get a good sense of the 3D-ness and it's hard to judge the size. So even though I liked the piece a lot, it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do.

That wouldn't have caused me to redo it, except for one thing.  I realized after looking at it for a

while that it would have been more pinwheel-ish if I had put the arms that extend out right at the points of the hexagon that is the central structure of the necklace instead of in the middle of each face of the hex.  Then it occurred to me that the best way to do it would have been to make a tetrahelix that would be part of the central part of the necklace and then continue into the extending arm.  That would be a true pinwheel. And I rearranged the gold tubes to highlight the spiral better.  Also I'm putting together an application for an exhibit of mathematical art and that would be a much purer mathematical structure. 

So I redid it, and was quite pleased with the results.But that still left the photography problem.  I took lots of pics, basically redoing all the mistakes I had made with the original necklace.  Photographing it on the black form was the best way to get a sense of the size and dimensionality. But for some reason that I fail to understand, whenever I did that, even in the same room and under the same light conditions as the other shots, I got a picture that waymore washed out.  Finally, I turned out all the lights, so I only had indirect light from the window, and dialed back the exposure to make it even darker--and it worked.  I think it shows off the piece quite well.  No idea why.

Reworking a design

   I think in my last post I talked about liking a sort of controlled asymmetry best.  I had no more said that when I started doing several pieces that turned out symmetrical.  Oh well.  I'm often not sure where I'll end up when I start a piece, and I like that.
  The top picture here (which I think I blogged about earlier) is a tetrahelix using gold-filled tubes spiraling around oxidized copper ones.  I had some problems with the beads, and decided to redo it using oxidized sterling silver instead.  But when my spiral got to be 9 tetrahedrons long, I wondered what it would look like if I just mirror imaged it for 9 more tetrahedrons.  Actually, I like both versions.  In making my sort of pendant-ish necklaces, I've switched from a narrow right angle weave to a hand-made chain using 18 gauge sterling wire.  Learning to make the links (which is actually pretty 

easy) has given me more confidence in doing simple wire working.  One of these days, I really need to learn some more about metalsmithing.

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.

tetrahelix

   I haven't posted in  while, but I've been playing with a spiraling structure of tetrahedrons that I mentioned a few months ago. In the interim, the beaded molecule folks talked about the same structure in their blog, so now I know it's called a tetrahelix, i.e. a helix made of tetrahedra.  I borrowed their idea of accenting the spiral-ness by using different color beads for the 3 outside edges of the helix. 
   I've been thinking for a while about using different tubes to contrast with the oxidized copper.  To do that I have to cut my own tube beads, but that opens up lots of possibilities too, because I can vary the length to alter the structures.  I suspect that soon I'm going to wish I knew some trigonometry.  My only memory of trig is looking up 4 digit decimal numbers in tables in the back of the math book.  This was, of course, in the bygone days before calculators.  But now I find myself wanting to know things like what angle I'm creating between 2 faces, or  2 beads, and I think that's the realm of trig.  One of the nice things about doing this stuff with beads is that if the angle is close to what you need, you can make it work.
   In this piece I didn't play with angles and lengths.  Learning to saw the tubing was a first step and that was enough for starters. I bought gold filled tubing and cut tubes the same length as the long copper ones I've been using.  I like the effect.  Another possibility is stainless steel tubes ( which are actually hypodermic syringe tubes), or anodized and colored aluminum.  The stainless would, of course, be much harder to cut, and I like the idea of colored aluminum, but the tubes I've found so far are much fatter than the copper ones, so I'm not sure they'll look right if used in the same piece.  So much to learn (and such fun doing it!).