Scaffolds and pods

A few posts ago I showed a piece where I alternated strings of interlocked cubes with oxidized copper tube scaffold-like structures.  I had started out to make the necklace entirely of the cubes, but found it was getting too massive and dense.  The areas of copper tubes opened it up and I liked that better.  Even then, though, it was pretty big.  Not something I'd wear myself, although I'm trying to get beyond limiting myself to the sort of jewelry I personally wear.  Anyway, I wanted to do something a bit less massive.  So I made these 3-sided "pods" in shades of purple, blue and gray.  They have right angle corners at each end, so they interlock just the way the cubes do, but they have a narrower profile, so they don't bulk up so much.  Also, I liked the colors of the pods with the almost-black of the oxidized copper.

Circles of pearls

I've been playing some with freshwater pearls lately.  I made the first, larger circle using cubic RAW, alternating cubes with triangular forms to get the curve you need to make a circle.  My intent was for it to be the focal of a pendant.  I didn't like how much thread showed.  Part of the problem, I think, was that, because the pearls are quite a light gray, I used white fireline instead of black, and I think that was a mistake. The black would have disappeared into the shadows of the pearls better than the white.   Still, in either color, there's a lot of thread.  The second one was done (with black fireline) using the hexagon as a base, as I learned from the beaded molecules blog.  It's smaller, but I like it much better.  I like the openness of it.  Also, if I were making a series of them for a necklace, which I probably will do, the weight is less (54 pearls instead of 65), which I prefer.

interlocked cubes and scaffolds

Several months ago I did a few posts about some work I had done with interlocking cubes made of seed beads.  The last post (In May) was about a set of cubes with rounded corners that I had done.  At the time I said I'd like to do a whole necklace of them. There were 2 problems with that, though.  One, it would have taken forever.  I do lots of things that take forever, though, so that probably wouldn't have stopped me if I'd been really happy with what I was getting.  The bigger problem was that it was so very dense, I had the feeling that wearing it would be sort of like wearing those high starched ruffs that Spaniards used to wear.  Lord knows I like a piece that has some 3-dimensionality to it, but this was just going to be too much.  So it sat on my work table, partially made, for several months.  Then I thought about using my oxidized copper scaffolds to open it up.  That's what I did here, and I think it's a big improvement.  On most anyone's scale, it's still a pretty dense piece, and it won't be to everyone's taste.  But to my eye, the open areas break it up just enough that it doesn't seem like you're drowning in it.  If anything, as I look at the picture, I think I might go back and make the scaffold at the 4 o'clock position a bit longer to open it up just a bit more.  Anyway, I'm glad I waited and stared at it for a while.

keggin and keggin-ish structures

    I'm on a 2-week break, since the store that my husband and I own is closed for the holidays.  Just when I had lots of free time, the beaded molecules folks (thebeadedmolecules.blogspot.com) posted a set of pictures that set me off on another structural journey.
The structure is called a keggin structure and wikipedia says it's the form of certain acid molecules.  I confess to not being much interested in the chemistry of it, but only in the geometry.  Geometrically. the structure is made of groups of 3 octahedrons that serve as the triangles in a larger structure.  The top  picture shows one such unit.  You can see on one edge (the top in this pic) there's a big triangle, and on the other edge (bottom) there are 3 small triangles that meet at a point in the center.   4 of these units, with the 1-triangle side on the outside and the 3-triangle side to the cente, form a  tetrahedron-ish thing.
    In thebeaded molecules site they showed 5 versions of this structure, identified by Greek letters that I don't have the font to write.  Picture 2 is the alpha version.  Till I made it, I couldn't tell how the others differed.  Turns out that in the alpha version, the triangles on the outside all line up with edges parallel to one another.  In the beta version one of them is point-to-edge.  Each of the others has 1 more triangle arranged point-to-edge till all 4 are that way.  But I had to see it in front of me before I understood it.  It's really hard to show a 3 dimensional structure like this well in a flat picture.  Even more so for me because I don't have 2 colors of bugle beads in the same length just now.
  Anyway, that's it for the Keggin structure.  But for me, since I'm dealing with it just as a geometric structure, not as a chemical thing, it seemed that the next logical step would be to take 8 of these triangle-ish units and make an octahedral version of the structure. So that's picture 3.  Then I took the 8 triangle version and made all the triangles point-to-edge instead of edge-to-edge.  That's the last picture.  I also improved things in that one by making the seed bead accents on the outside a different color from those on the inside of the structure, so that it's easier to read what's going on.
     A person just a little crazier than I  could also take 20 of the 3-octahedron units and make an icosahedron, but I think I've just about exhausted my interest in this.

Playing with pebbles

I bought these "pebbles" recently.  They're green aventurine.  I've been mostly working with my copper tube beads but I ran out of them a few days ago, and am waiting to get more.  So, in the meantime, I picked up the pebbles and started experimenting with them.  I like the way they break up the grid in an otherwise very rigid structure.  The one on the left is just plain RAW.  The middle one is RAW too, but with a triangular cross section, so that there are just 3 squares in each row, instead of 4.  It makes the tube a bit smaller.  But in both of them, and especially the one with the triangles, there's a lot of thread showing.  I'm using monofilament, so it doesn't show too much in the picture, but the irregularity of the beads necessarily means that more thread shows than I like.  The 3rd on is better that way, because I was using a structure of hexagons instead of squares.  You get a bigger, more open  tube, with places where you can see through the tube, and not as much thread showing.  Not sure exactly where I'll go with all this, but I kind of like the Payday candy bar look of it.

PS one other thing I should mention--I tried a couple of spherical shapes (a dodecahedron and a cuboctahedron) and they came out looking like lumps.

Oxidized copper and stick pearls

This was a fun piece to make.  I did a necklace a while ago that had some stick pearls in it in place of the oxidized copper tubes.  But I used dark gray pearls and I only had 10 or 12 of them, so they didn't have as much impact as I'd hoped for. This one came out more the way I intended.  I've found that if I alternate 1 or 2 octahedrons with  what I guess you'd call a triangular prism, you get a blend of firmness ( from the octahedrons, since they're all triangles) and flexibility (from the prisms, since they have squares for the sides with a triangular cross section) that works pretty well.  Anyway, I enjoyed making this. 

Oxidized copper lozenges

Since I started playing with adding small  (#11) seed beads at the ends of long bugle beads, I've started experimenting with adding them to the oxidized copper tube structures too.  This necklace is an example.  It's a sort of a remake of a necklace I made in late 2011 and posted about at the time (Doing too much, posted in December 2011).  It has quite a different look, though, done in tube beads instead of seed beads.  Much airier and lacy looking.  Also, since the "lozenges" were all the same color, except for different colored seed bead accents, I felt I couldn't mass them as closely together.  So they're spread out more on the RAW chain.  Now I think I'd like to work with more brightly colored accent beads, and see what I get. 

bugle bead structures

   A few days ago, I wrote a post about the trouble I was having making structures out of long bugle beads, because of the sharp edge of the glass bugle fraying the fireline.  Gwen commented saying that when she uses bugle beads she adds a seed bead at each  end of it and treats the group of 3 like a single bead.  I said that might be an answer. Actually, though, it sounded to me like too many seed beads.  I was adding a single bead between each bugle, so as to make a slightly truncated tetrahedron.  The small flat face (a triangle of 3 seed beads) at each point of the tet added a bit of wobble, but not too much.  But it seemed to me, thinking of the first triangle you'd make in the tet, that doing it Gwen's way you'd be adding 2 seed beads between each bugle, and so you'd be adding that many more seed beads, and it would get more and more crowded where several tets meet.  Gwen, I hope you read this, because you were totally right and I was totally wrong.  Turns out that as you keep adding tets, it actually gets less crowded. I can't explain it, so I took a picture.  There are 2 structures, each consisting of 3 tets  The 1 on the left was done "my" way, making truncated tets.  The 1 on the right was done the other way.  Each one has 3 seed beads at each point where 3 bugles meet.  So that by even thought your 1st  triangle has 6 seed beads in it instead of 3, by the time you've finished a whole tet, the total number of seed beads is the same either way.  More importantly when 2 or 3 tets share elements ( in these the bugle bead in the center is part of all 3 tets) the structure done my way has 7 beads at the top and the bottom of that central bugle bead, and you can see they kind of bunch up.  When I did it Gwen's way there are only 5 and it all fits together much more neatly, even using #8 seed beads.    That's good for me, because, especially when I use the 30mm bugles, using #11s at the ends just doesn't look right to me.  To my eye a bugle that big needs a bigger accent bead.  Even here, with 20 mm bugles, I like the 8s.

   Once I figured that much out, I started thinking of my oxidized copper tubes.  Not that I need to protect the thread there, but I knew that sometimes it would be nice to add a bit of color.  The pic on the left is an earring (unfinished, obviously) using #8 beads in several metallic tones as accents to the dark gray tubes.  Here I may actually end up using smaller seed beads, as the diameter of the tube is small.  I don't have many #11s right now, so I used my usual 8s, and I think that it works.  I'll try #11s next and compare the results.  Anyway, this has all been fun.  Thanks, Gwen

new webpage

Just a quick post.  As beadweaving has become as important a part of what I do as rugweaving, I've wanted to have a website that treated the 2 media equally.  So I've started emiliepritchard.com.  I'm still working on it, adding more pictures, captions and such, but it does basically what I want to do.  Check it out; I'd love your feedback, as it's still quite fluid.

bugle bead scaffolds

   I've been putting together applications for spring art festivals.  I decided to use mostly my tube bead pieces, because they're the ones that, to me, look the most different from what other people are doing.  So I did mostly my oxidized copper pieces.  I wanted to have one, though that had tubes with some color, so I bought some long bugle beads.  It turned out that the ones I liked best didn't actually have so much color.  As so often happens the picture on the website wasn't a totally accurate representation of the actual item.  I don't mean that as a criticism ( this was Shipwreck beads); I think it's just inevitable.  Anyway, even though they weren't very bright, I really liked them.  These are

30 mm bugles, so they really make a big structure.  I made these 2 necklaces right away.  The bottom one also has 15mm turquoise bugles.
    The hardest part was dealing with the sharpness of the glass beads.  I used fireline, and learned to push the new beads tight up against the old ones before I started pulling on the thread.  Even so the thread would be somewhat frayed looking by the time I got to the end of it.  That was partly because I  used very long lengths of thread (around 7') because, as you can imagine, making structures out of beads that are over 1" long uses up thread in a heartbeat.  On the bottom necklace, which was the first one I made, I went back again after I had made the whole thing and ran several threads along the whole length of the nceklace ( at top, bottom and middle) and put #11 beads between the bugles to ease the sharp angle.  I think they were too small to help much, but the extra threads should strengthen it enough.  On the 2nd (top) one I used #8 blue beads and put them between every bugle bead in each triangle.  They were almost too big, because when I got lots of triangles coming together at a point, I started to not quitehave room for the last ones, and things distorted just a bit.  The ideal bead would be as long as a #8, but with a smaller diameter.  Possibly a delica would do that, but I needed to do this quickly and didn't have any at hand.  Or 2 #11s, but I don't think I like that idea as well. Another possibility would be to use a bead reamer to round off the inside edges just a bit.  I only have around 150 bugles in each piece, so that wouldn't be impossible.
    Anyway, I had great fun making these, and I think they'll improve my applications ( I used the top necklace in the one I just sent in).  So cross your fingers for me!
   

bowl with wide lip

I've been having trouble with the blogger website.  If I try to move my picture to the left and write next to it, as I usually do, I can't get a cursor, so I'll just do it this way.
    I've been wanting to try using 4mm glass beads (druk beads) to do some of the things I've been doing with 4 mm gemstone beads.  Turns out they're much easier to work with.  Mostly it's because the hole is a bit bigger, and because since the bead is translucent, you can see the direction of the channel through it much more easily. 
  I've been thinking about making a vessal form.  Originally when I decided to play around with beads, I thought I'd make vessal forms.  But a bowl or basket form is necessarily a relatively big project, and you learn more quickly by trying lots of smaller projects and seeing which ones work for you.  So I started making jewelry instead.  Now I find I like jewelry (and I like wearing my jewelry), but I still want to do an occasional bowl or vase  or other form that's just sculptural.  I knew I wanted to keep this one relatively flat, bacause I've found that as a vessal's sides get high, the weight starts to squish it down. It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but the center part is the bowl, which is about 4.5" in diameter and 2" high.  The darker rim makes the whole thing just under 7" in diameter.  I think that, given the width, it needs a bit more height, so I'll probably go back and addsome sort of base onto the bottom.  Also that will make it more stable.
   This is pretty weird--I've just realized that I've misspelled vessel all the way through this post, but the only thing I can get the cursor to do is add more on the end.  So please ignore any misspellings, typos and such.  I wish I knew what the problem is.

Back home

I just got back from my trip to Michigan.  It was a long trek, but I had a great time, visited my sister, and even won a prize at the art festival in Royal Oak--I got first place!  Totally cool.  I also took an order for a custom rug, so it's back to the loom.