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.

more ruffly things

The first image (actually they're switched and it's the 2nd) was my first hyperbolic plane. It starts with 1 heptagon in the middle. The second layer puts 7 heptagons around it. The 3rd layer is 22 heptagons around. The 4th layer would have been 56 heptagons, but after I had done some of it I took it out, because, as I said in the earlier post, the piece was sticking out too far from the body for a pendant. It was nicely ruffly however.
I can't quite figure out the math for why the progression is 1,7,22,56. The first 2 numbers are obvious, but then it got wierd. I keep thinking maybe there's a stray octagon or hexagon somewhere, which would screw up the counting, but if there is I haven't found it. Another possibility just occurred to me. Maybe I just counted wrong, and the 3rd number is 21. It gets really hard to keep track of which layer is which, and it seems like they should all be multiples of 7. Oh,well...
The 2nd picture is the ruffle that starts with a tube and gradually flares out till it gets ruffly. This came from reading about all the crocheted coral reef forms. I loved how the engineers were trying to create the ruffles by scotchtaping bits of graph paper around in a spiral, adding 1-1-1-2 (you can change the algorithm by varying the number of 1s between each 2) and it was really cumbersome. Then one of the female engineers realized you could do the same thing with crochet stitches, and it would be far easier, and would represent it better too. I used a ladder stitch instead of crocheting. As I remember, some of the forms are 1112 and some are 112 (these start to ruffle faster and go really crazy really quickly).
Anyway, I like these, and someday I'll get around to doing something with them, but I probably won't make any more, as they take a loooong time.

hyperbolic plane

Haven't posted in a while, but experimentation goes on. This is a piece based on the hyperbolic plane. If you tile with hexagons, you, of course, get a flat plane. But if you tile with heptagons, you get a hyperbolic plane, which gets rufflier and rufflier as you move outward, like some heads of cabbage. The first one I did was round. I intended it to be a focal piece for a pendant, but it sort of got too 3-dimensional too fast (i.e. it stuck out too far from the wearer's body). I'll try to get a picture of it up in a day or so, but I don't have one now. Anyway I decided I wanted it long and narrow instead, so it would get ruffly, but not TOO ruffly. You could also do this using circles of 7 beads for the heptagons, but I wanted more "there" there, so I made my heptagons out of 7 triangles.
There's another way to get a ruffly structure that starts with a tube instead of a plane (maybe a hyperbolic cylinder? I actually have no idea what I'm talking about here). It comes out looking sort of like a petunia. I made a few of these quite a while ago, and liked them, but never quite figured out what to do with them. I think they should probably be the ends of a sort of a rope necklace, but have never made it. I'll try to get a picture of these too. They're much less open than these plane structures, so they took a long time to do.

new rug

This is the other thing I've been working on recently. It's related, in design, to the one in blues and purples with black and white that I showed a couple of posts ago. That one has small black and white areas along the top left and lower right edges of the S. I wanted to expand those areas and create a space that would separate the foreground S from the background. My original plan was to do this in black and white like the other rug, but at the last moment I decided to make the rug much more muted by using tan and green instead of black and white. I like it, although I'm still partial to the older rug.

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.

tetrahedron in tetrahedron

Back to geometric beadwork. I started this tetrahedron piece a while ago and sort of bogged down in the middle of weaving it. But I really like it now that it's done. I have 2 pictures because it's hard to capture the 3 dimensionalness in a picture (at least with my level of skill at photography). The problem is that the last thing you do is add the little lilac seed beads along the edges and that does alot to firm up the structure because it is a straight piece of monofilament running down each edge. So all the time you're making it it's way too floppy, and there's no way to know till you're done whether it is going to firm up enough to make the whole piece work. I had made a considerably smaller version, but, of course, as you get bigger, you tend to get floppier. Fortunately it did firm up quite nicely, and made a good piece.
I ought to add that the beads are around 15mm long, and the large tetrahedron is around 7" on a side, although it isn't in front of me now, so I can't measure it.