flower links

I've been having great fun with my "embellished" links. lately. This one was a big step for me in a way. Up to now I've been fairly subdued, and fairly limited in my color palette in the beadwork. This is just the opposite of what I've been doing in my rugs. The reason, mostly, has been that for the rugs I can dye my own colors and so create whatever I want. When I first started beadwork, I'd go online and pick, say, 4 colors for a piece I wanted to make. But when they arrived, they'd always be not quite what I had pictured. Either I'd feel like 1 or 2 didn't work at all, or 2 of them would be almost indistinguishable from each other. So I got in the habit of de-emphasizing color. That was good because it forced me to concentrate on the forms.
I took a crafts design course at the local community college a while ago and the teacher, a metalsmith and jeweler, told a story that stuck with me. She was working with another jeweler, who asked her what she could do to take her work to the next level. Pat (the teacher) said "Make some pieces without stones." She said "But I love working with stones." Pat said she knew that, but her work was too dependant on the stones, and if she worked without stones for a while, her other skills would get better, so that when she put the stones back in, the work would be stronger. I immediately thought "Damn, I'd have to leave out color." I was thinking mostly about rugweaving then, so I thought about making a series of black and white or neutral rugs, but I couldn't make myself do it.
So my problems finding the colors I wanted forced me to do just the sort of thing the teacher was talking about. Meanwhile one gradually acquires alot of colors of beads. I really like the pieces in the muted and metallic tones. And they can be worn with lots of things, which is good. But it was really fun to put lots of color back in the work. My favorite beadworker is Yael Krakowski(if you don't know her work, check out yaelkrakowski.com) and I love her use of color. This piece has a somewhat similar feel, I think. Anyway, I'm pleased with it.

new rug

Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. I thought I'd do a post about a rug I finished a few weeks ago. I've been doing lots of these striped pieces lately (in fact I've just finished another one but don't have a picture yet. One thing that makes this one interesting is that it uses the same color progressions as the one I posted about a few months ago (September post), but in an entirely different way. The other one had a very regular progression--6" of red followed by 6" of red'orange, followed by 6" of orange and so on. It's the additon of the black design that makes it interesting. This one has just the color progression, but having the 2 sets of stripes alternating with each other and 2 colors in each stripe allows me to actually have 4 different color progressions going at the same time. It's kind of like a round in music. That makes me have to have a pattern that's very simple, and here it's continuous just like the color progressions. I've found, at the couple of shows this fall where I've shown my rugs, that I seem to get more compliments on the earlier one, but, while I like them both, I think this one is my personal favorite.

There's a better picture of my fullerene necklace on my etsy site at http://www.etsy.com/listing/64265906/red-and-green-tubes-necklace. I meant to put it in the blog, but discovered I hadn't saved it properly at the time I did the earlier blog post.

fullerene jewelry and structures

Wow--The Japanese site with the fullerene structures has me off and running again. Alot of it is really cool but too big to work as jewelry (I'm tending to do this kind of work with 4 mm beads. Possibly with smaller beads...). I've come up with a structure, that you see in my green "jack" (as in ball and jacks) structure that is a bit smaller than what I see on the chemists' sites. Maybe it doesn't work as a carbon structure (I, of course, have no idea), but it creates a smaller tube and still has things coming off at right angles, which I find is a good structure to work with. Basically it's a tube that is 4 hexagons around. Theirs tend to be 5,6 or 8 around. Now to turn it into a jewelry form.
I've also included a picture of a "fullerene style" necklace I did recently. I've learned a bit since then, and there are a few things I'd do just a bit differently, but still I think it came out pretty well. One thing I've learned since I did this is that the chemists ussually form their tubes so that the hexagons have a straight edge paralleling the tube, but not one at right angles to it. I did the opposite on this one. I think you get a stiffer tube if you do it their way.
Anyway, I'm still scheming things, learning alot and having great fun. Are any of you who read this making structures like this?

More ping pong ball work. I was disappointed that my necklace form didn't get into the art to wear show. But after looking at it for a while, I decided that it was a bit plain. I made it with a continuous thread (yarn) just as you would in normal beading. By contrast, on most of my earlier pieces I had used short pieces of yarn that were tied together between each ball. This made for lots of color and texture to break up the balls. The problem was that I had made several pieces that involved 5-bead and 6-bead circles. When you make those sort of circles the beads pack close together and you don't really have room for a knot between each one. I managed to pull it off in the dodecahedron that's pictured, but when I tried a buckyball it wasn't firm enough and wanted to sag out of round. But, as any beader knows, when you make a circle of 3 or 4 beads you can see much more thread between the beads. That means you have room to put a knot between the beads for interest. So that's what I did for my wreath form, which is a variation on right angle weave, and so uses circles of 3 or 4 balls. I'll probably redo my buckyball with a continuous thread, and just add short bits of yarn to the finished sphere at the intersections so as not to compromise the structure. Who would have thought there was so much to learn from ping pong balls.

ping pong necklace

I thought since this piece is all about scale, it would make sense to add a picture of it on me, so I got my son to take this. Terrible picture, but it does the job.

ping pong ball necklace

I've had a fun day. A few weeks ago Florida Craftsmen sent out a call to artists for an Art to Wear show with a theme of unusual materials. Seemed like time to break out the ping pong balls. Most of the pieces I've made so far have been just 1 bead/ball thick, because otherwise the size seemed overwhelming. But that has meant that they were verging on not being firm enough. I did make one basket form that was thicker (made from ball tetrahedrons) and I thought it was a bit too thick for its overall size. I don't think it's on this blog, but if you want to take a look it's in my etsy shop--eporiginals.etsy.com. Now I'm rethinking and I plan trying to add on to the outside to make the overall size more in line with the thickness.
Anyway, for the necklace, I knew I wanted it to be an actual 3-dimensional structure. I started making a string of RAW cubes, but that was really too big, so I switched to triangular sections, and liked that better. I tried other types of line, looking for something with a bit more bling, to make it seem like jewelry. Ultimately, I went back to the rug wool, though. It's really ideal, as it has enough cross section to fill up the holes in the balls (I drill 7/64" holes through the balls on a drill press) and yet it will compress to let me get multiple passes through a ball to create the structures. Also it's hairy enough that it creates friction so the thing doesn't loosen up if I don't keep it under tension.
After I got the main oval done I spent a long time figuring out now to embellish it on the bottom to make it more jewelry-ish. I tried adding some sparkly eyelash type thread, but they didn't fit with the scale. Then I tried it again with other colors of wool and still wasn't happy. Finally I came up with the dangly structure hanging from the center, and I really liked that. It's so very jewelry-ish to have a dangly thing hanging down, and yet the scale matches the rest of the necklace.
Anyway, I submitted it, and I really like it, although once again my family thinks I've lost my mind. I should mention that in the prospectus they had a great picture of a necklace made out of lego blocks, so I'm not totally out of their realm. And it was great fun, whether I get in the show or not.

Asymmetry

I'm working again with symmetry and asymmetry. I got some long black beads, and wanted to make a big chunky black necklace. My plan was a simple chain of octahedrons, mostly end to end, but with hard corners to create the circle you need for a necklace. It was the picture on the left (sorry for the blurry image). I was almost ready start working on the clasp, and I liked the piece alot. Just the size and blackness gave it enough drama, I thought. Then I got talking with a friend (thank you, Connie), and she told me how much she liked my asymmetrical work, so I started playing with the piece in front of a mirror. I ended up lengthening one side alot to the the piece on the left, and I think it's a big improvement. I'm still playing with the clasp a little, which is why you may see some monofilament in the picture.

I've just finished a book I really liked--Conversations with Frank Gehry. I've never thought of myself as a big Frank Gehry fan; I'm a bit too buttoned down for some of his work. In fact I've attached a picture of my latest necklace, which illustrates my buttoned-down-ness pretty well. But the book made me take another look and I found that I really liked alot of his buildings, particularly the somewhat more restrained ones. He told about his creative process and how his ideas unfold that was really interesting, and relates to all sorts of creative work. I've just put the Frank Gehry documentary on my Netflix queue, so I'll be seeing some more of the same.

new rug

I thought since I'd posted my dyed wool yarn, I'd post the rug that I wove from it. I thought the colors came out great, and the design was kept simple so as not to get in the way of the colors. I have enough yarn left for 1 or 2 more rugs using this color progression.

seed beads

I've sort of surprised myself by going back to doing alot of seed bead work. 6 months or so ago, I was doing lots of pieces using long beads--copper, glass, and stone ones. I liked that alot, and I'm still doing it. I particularly like it because the long beads show the geometry of the structures better than seed beads do. But I've gotten bothered by how much you're at the mercy of just what beads you can find. For example, I did several pieces using a mix of copper oval and tube beads. I was working on another when I got my next shipment from Fire Mountain Gems. This time the oval beads, which are listed as 4x9 mm, were noticeably smaller, and with a much smaller hole, making it hard to make the many passes through the hole that are sometimes needed. The earlier beads were actually longer than 9mm, and these were less than 9mm. Probably the earlier ones would round down to 9 mm and the new ones would round up to that, but they were clearly different. This isn't a criticism of Fire Mountain Gems, it's just that it messed me up. Other people sell 4x9 copper ovals, but there's no way of knowing if they're more like the earlier ones or the later ones. I had to take apart an unfinished necklace, so that I could mix up the larger and smaller beads so as to make the difference unnoticeable (actually, I still haven't finished the piece). Anyway, it irked me to be so dependant on the materials. As another example, I've done quite a bit with some glass tube beads around 14 mm long. I've gotten them from shipwreck. Now they're on sale, and I wonder if my source is about to dry up. You can always find seed beads, and RAW and similar weaves are endlessly variable. Anyway, some seed bead ideas have been percolating while I was working with the larger beads, so now I'm back to the little ones.

dying yarn

I haven't talked much so far about my rugweaving. My rugs are all about color. More so than the beadwork, because with my wool yarn I can dye my own colors. Last week I did one of my larger dye runs. It started with a page that I clipped out of the Company Store catalog quite a while ago. It showed cotton blankets in a range of colors. I liked that the colors were lively, but still a bit muted. The orange is sort of a spice color, the red is softened, etc. I've done alot of rugs with color progressions, but usually over a smaller range, e.g.yellow to blue or red to yellow. This time I went all the way from red to yellow to blue. I added a few colors to the ones in the catalog picture and changed the value of the colors to get darker hues on the ends and yellow in the middle. Also in the blanket colors there was a big gap between orange and yellow. I added a yellow-orange (the 3rd skein in the picture), but that's still the biggest gap in the series, I think. I dyed 2 lb of each, which will give me enough for around 3 rugs, since I'll partner the colors with a neutral. The 1st rug is on the loom now, and I'm using black with the colors.
in order to do the run I created 3 dyestocks, A blue muted with black, a yellow muted with brown and a red muted with some of the yellow and blue stocks. Then I could create the gradual progressing by putting successively more of one stock and less of the next one so that I worked my way around the color wheel. I still have some red and some blue left, so if I want I could complete the "circle" by dying wome purple yarn, but for the moment I'm leaving it as is.