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?

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.

geometric shapes

These 2 pieces have been on my mental drawing board for a while now. Finally made them. The green one is mostly about the stones, and the various greens. The other one is me starting to put together some of the shapes I've figured out. I like the look of the stone beads, but it sure is a pain to find the holes in them. Partly it's just that I need a better light, I think. It's OK for most things, but not for finding holes in beads. Black onyx are the worst!

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.

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.

more scarves

I'm still having fun weaving scarves. At first this sort of weaving seemed a bit boring, since you can't do much designing as you weave, the way you can with my shaft-switched rugs. But now I'm finding that the color interactions are really interesting. When you weave a rug, the weft totally covers the warp, so there's only the color of the wefts to think about. But in these scarves, as in most weaving, you can see both warp and weft, so they contribute together to the final color. These 3 scarves were all woven on the same warp. it was wide stripes of reds, oranges, golds etc, alternating with marrow stripes of blues & greens. Different colors of weft made for interesting changes in the look of the scarves.

Some Scarves

I've taken a bit of a break from my rugweaving to weave some scarves. In some ways it's less interesting than the rugweaving, as the possibilities for designing are much more limited by the threading pattern that you set up before you start to weave. But sometimes it's nice to make something relatively small and quick. Actually I've been trying off and on for a while to come up with a way of making scarves that was both fast enough that I could sell them at a reasonable price, and yet interesting enough that I would be proud of them. This is the first set of scarves that sort of hit that sweet spot, so I think I'll make some more and have a small display of them in my rug booth in shows I do this spring.

Flower necklace

I was pretty pleased with this piece. I love these metal beads. the piece is based on some of the work in the Japanese site that is referenced in the beaded molecules blog. It's http://horibe.jp/Gr2F.HTM, and has lots of cool stuff. I actually intended to more or less copy a shape that's in it, except to change it by turning 2 of the bump-outs into cylindrical chains that would be the actual necklace. Actually I ended up making a slightly different structure, because I started from a torus with a larger inner diameter than theirs. After several false starts I ended up making a plain torus so that I could look at it to figure where and how to make the bumpouts on the second one. I'm working on another one where the symmetry will be broken up by having bumpouts of different lengths and configurations.

doing too much

This is about design. What I wanted was to take something symmetrical,in this case a 3-sided lozenge sort of shape, and pile up a bunch of them to create a necklace that was less buttoned down than symmetrical shapes tend to be. So far so good, and I like the way the idea turned out. But you're looking at 2 versions of the design. The first one has extra lozenges in the main structure, as well as the ones hung from it. Bad idea! I'm drawn to techniques (beadweaving and loom weaving) that require alot of relatively monotonous repetition to get a completed piece. Because of that I have to watch my tendency to throw in something extra, mostly out of boredom. I've done that on rugs too. Here, I went back and tore out the extra lozenges, because they just distracted, in my opinion, from the central design. I like version 2 much better. Maybe someday I'll learn.