New Shape

I've been working again on creating different torus shapes based on the tube structures I learned from the Beaded Molecules people.  Since they're based on 6-bead circles, which serve as hexagons, they lend themselves to circles, triangles, diamonds.  shapes with right angles come harder.  I did a post last September where I came up with several shapes.  One of them, which I did in dark brownish red, was vaguely right angled, because I used 4 9-bead circles in the middle to get the curve.  It didn't sit flat, though, and just generally wasn't satisfactory.  I was playing around the other day and came up with a much better structure.  It still uses 4 9-bead circles in the middle (they're the darker green ones) but they're arranged differently, and I like the shape much better.  As a more general thing, it's a way to make a clean right angle turn in a tube structure.

Charms for Baltimore ACC show

    This will probably be my last post before heading for Baltimore and the ACC show there.  I've been working on charms for the show.  I think I mentioned that they have a special promotion for the jewelers who want to participate by making a "mini-collection" of charms and pieces incorporating charms.  I've made several pieces, and these are the 2 I like best.  The first is a charm bracelet with charms that combine my oxidized silver tubes with gemstones.  #2 is a necklace, just using the tubes. I've also made several loose charms, because I think one of the most interesting things about the promotion is that the show people will create and sell pieces (charm bracelets, necklaces, whatever) that incorporate charms from several artists.  I think that sounds interesting.
      If any of you are in the Baltimore area next weekend (Feb 20-22) come check out the show.  It's at the Baltimore Convention Center, down town.  I'm in booth 501, and I'd love to show you my work.

Octahedron shapes.

   I've been playing around with the different shapes I can get in octahedrons.  I started thinking about how I don't get a firm shape using RAW with tube beads because a square isn't rigid the way a triangle is.  But on the other hand right angles are just so "freindly" to work with.  We're surrounded by them, and we know how they work.  So I started imagining  octahedrons (octs)that were more or less square in overall shape. I wanted the piece to be not too deep, i.e. not sticking up too far off the body (as lots of my pieces do).  So with a relatively flat oct I could just use Pythagorus to figure out how long to make the "waist" beads--here the gold beads-- so that you'd have a right triangle, and that would make a square shaped oct.  The cross-wise and length-wise tubes are 20mm long, so a 28mm gold tube would be about right.  Actually, though, I decided to use 25mm cold tubes instead, so the octs aren't quite square, but zigzag a bit.  Partly that was because I thought a bit of a zigzag was more interesting, and partly because I prefer using more or less stock lengths rather than cutting tubes just for a single design.  If I use stock lengths (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25mm), I have more flexibility in the design.  If I cut custom pieces ahead of time, I have to have it all figured out before I do it, and I like to sort of make it up as I go along, even if I have the general idea figured out at the start.  Also there would be lots of times that I would cut lots of, say 28mm tubes and then discover that to get the right curve, I really needed them to be 27.5 or 29mm or whatever. 
   Here, when I got to the back and needed to make it curve, I had to use shorter tubes on the inside triangles than on the outside ones.  The ideal length for the inside tubes would have been around 18mm, so I just alternated between 15mm tubes in 1 oct and 20mm ones in the next.  One of these days I'd like to skip the curve and do a piece that would look sort of like a tic-tac-toe grid.  

dangles redone; learning about structures

   Well, I redid my dangles, as I mentioned in my last post, and they do indeed dangle more freely now.
    The thing I probably should have talked more about concerning this necklace is the tube itself.  It took several tries to get it right.  The nice thing about doing more random structures is that when you need it to curve, you can just start throwing in a few short tubes on one side and longer ones on the other side till you get the amount of curve you need,  But with a piece like this, where you keep repeating a structural shape, you have to get the shape right so that it will produce the curve you need.  My initial plan was that my tube would be octahedrons ( I call them octahedrons because they're made of 8 triangles, but, of course, they're not equilateral triangles as they would be in a true octahedron).  The cross-section triangle would be all short (15mm) tubes .  The tubes running more or less lengthwise would be 20 mm, except that to get the curve I wanted the triangle on the outside would have 25mm tubes.  I'm trying to use tubes of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 mm and make that work without cutting special lengths for a particular piece.  Anyway, it didn't work--the curve was too tight.  I tried 2 more variations before I came up with this one, where the cross-sectional triangle alternates between a 15mm equilateral one and an isosceles one.  That made a curve that was just a bit too shallow, but I had a few longer tubes (28-ish mm) so I could put them in the 2 outside triangles at the very center, i.e. bottom of the necklace and get a sharper curve just there.
  This brings up a whole new idea--that I have to move from thinking of a piece as a chain of units, and think more about the overall piece as a unit.  I came up against this same issue some years ago in a sphere I made and posted about at the very start of this blog.  My idea was to take the basic dodecahedron ( Plato bead in

some publications) and think of it as a bead to use in building a bigger sphere, a truncated icosahedron ( or Archimedes bead).  That's what I did here (sort of--Actually there are 60 small spheres, not 90, but anyway...).  I built it adding on 1 sphere after another, and when I got to the last 4 or 5 spheres it was really hard to get the needle in and out as the big sphere closed up.  After I was done I realized it would have gone much easier if after I had gotten, say, 2/3 done I had switched my viewpoint to the whole sphere.  Then I could have built the whole inside of the rest of the sphere, the very dark blue beads, then the whole middle layer, the clear beads, and finished with the outer cobalt blue layer.

    Now I'm have the same issue with my tube necklaces. Here's one in particular.  I've been using a chain of tetrahedrons to make either a bracelet or a necklace.  Mostly the only way I could make the structure go from making a bracelet to making a necklace was to make all the tetrahedrons bigger. 

  But then I rethought, and realized there are sort of 3 parts to the structure.  The last picture shows it (I hope) with bugle beads.  First there's a series of triangles at the top of the structure, which will be the inside of the curve.

In this example they're a sort of light iridescent gray, and you can see them by themselves on the left.  By playing with the size of these triangles you can vary the height of the piece.  I have tended so far to make it tall  and sort of dog collar-ish.  Then there are the tubes (here dark gray and spirally) that turn those original triangles into tetrahedrons, so that the dog collar becomes a spiked dog collar, as in the center.  Actually you could leave the piece like this, and one of these days I probably will. 
   Finally, you have the zigzagging tubes on the outside edge of the curve.  Here I have just 2 bright silver ones on the far right.  It turns out that the length of these tubes determines the shape of the curve.  Here I've used tubes that are shorter than the other ones.  By using shorter tubes (20mm instead of 30mm) you almost eliminate the curve in the structure.  The longer the tube the tighter the curve.  So now I understand the structure and will have much more control over what I build with it.

  This has been pretty windy, but spelling it out helps me get it into my head, so if you've gotten this far, my apologies for the length.  Also the paragraphing got real weird at the end and I don't have the energy to go back and fix it.  Happy New Year.
  

scaffold with dangles

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm playing around with charms for  the Baltimore ACC show coming up in February.  I'm finding I like them a lot.  My work, being so structural, tends to be relatively inflexible.  Mostly I like that, but it's interesting how adding things that dangle freely softens it up.  This necklace is a good example.  I made a very architectural scaffold-ish piece.  Particularly in the darkened sterling it has the feel of a bridge truss or cell phone tower or something of the sort.  But when you add the tear-drop shaped dangles it changes it completely, especially with the amazonite beads adding color..  It reminds me a bit of the great pieces that the artist Emiko Oke makes, using lego blocks to build Tiffany-esque  necklaces.
  I have just one technical problem with it, and with charms in general.  I find that you can't use open jump rings at the top of a beaded charm.  Eventually it will move in such a way that the thread get up against the opening in the ring, and it will pass through the opening, because it's just thread.  You have to use closed rings.  Ditto for a ring attached to a necklace structure.  In the pieces I've made so far for the charm program I've attached the charms to oxidized silver links that I've made. They have open circles at each end, so I can slip the closed rings at the top of the charms into the open circles and close them up.  But I wanted to attach them to one of my truss structures.  Ideally you'd have a closed ring attached to the necklace and it would interlock with a closed ring on the charm.  But obviously 2 closed rings can't interlock unless you use an open jump ring between them, and I think that's too long a chain of rings.  If I could solder, I could link 2 rings together and then solder them closed, but I don't have the equipment or the skill to do that.  In this piece I used a single closed ring that's sewn at the top to the necklace and at the bottom to the charm, but it doesn't dangle quite as freely as I'd like.  I think what I'm going to do is reattach the charms to the rings, but I'll add a single bead ( here a 3mm oxidized silver ball) at the top of the charm so the thread coming from the charm will pass through that first, and then to the ring.  I think that will let it dangle better.
 

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.

asymmetry versus randomness

 I just finished a piece (the 3rd one in this group) and it got me thinking about some of the things I like in a design.  I actually like all 3 of these pieces, but in some ways the last one works best for me.  It is neither entirely symmetrical, like the first piece, nor as random as the 2nd one.  It's sort of a Goldilocks thing, where you can easily see the symmetry, as well as the decision to break it.  A bit like the motto of Oregon College of Art and Craft--Know the rules to break the rules.  I've always been drawn to that idea.  Anyway, I'm busy making pieces like #3 now.

etsy again

OK, my long-dormant etsy site is live again, with just a few pieces on it.  I plan to add a few every day till I get a reasonable selection.  When I started this blog, I swore I wouldn't make it a "here's my newest piece on etsy" sort of thing, but would talk about my ideas on a more creative level.  So hopefully I won't mention it again, but the link is there if you're interested.  While I'm doing a "commercial" post, I'll also mention that everything I make is for sale, even though only a small fraction of it will make it to etsy.  So if you see anything that interests you, just contact me and we'll work something out.

Etsy

Just a quickie post.  I have an etsy shop that's been inactive for a while, but over the weekend I'm going to try to reactivate it.  It's eporiginals.etsy.com and I'll try to put some of my new work on it if anyone is interested.

Charms

    I have a new project going.  I'm going to be showing my jewelry at the Baltimore ACC show next February.  They are doing a promotion around charms.  If you want to participate you have to commit to make, at a minimum. certain specified pieces.  For example, a charm bracelet, a necklace with a cluster of charms grouped at the bottom,  some loose charms, etc.  Then they do a certain amount of promotion, not relevant here, around charms.  It seemed ideal for my work, although, I've never made charms as such. 
   Anyway, ever since I signed up, I've been playing with making charms, as they need images of the work next month.  Some of them will be geometric structures made of tubes,  but I wanted to play with ways to mix gemstone beads with the tube structures.  These are what I've come up with so far.
   One thing that is inspiring me is I picture I look at from time to time in an old American Craft magazine from 2011.  It was about the glass school at Pilchuck, in Washington, and it had pictures of work of lots of glass artists who have been associated with Pilchuck over the years.  The one that interested me was a picture of vessels by Dante Marioni.  In it he had set himself some tight parameters. The vessels were all roughly the same size and were all made of clear glass with black glass trim.  But within those limits he had made over 150 vessels, each different from all the others and all interesting.  It sort of made me think of a Chopin etude, which is a piece you use to practice a technique, but that doesn't stop it from being beautiful.
  Anyway, I have lots more charms to make, but this is where I'm headed.

Live and learn

    I wanted to do something simple and rather stark with my oxidized silver tubes.  Cubic RAW was an obvious choice.  I'd never used it with the tubes, and I didn't really think it would work, but I tried it.
    Over time I've developed a sort of rule of thumb.  With round beads I don't much like structures that use triangles (i e circles of 3 beads) because too much thread shows.  Particularly I don't like to use monofilament  nylon fishing line and have 3-bead circles, because it won't pull tight over such a hard bend, and so lots of it sticks out.  I do occasionally do cuboctahedrons, which are a mix of 3-bead and 4-bead circles, but I tend to avoid them  when I can.  Similarly, with long narrow beads, and particularly with my metal tubes, I mostly only use triangles, because that's the only shape that will stay rigid with long beads.  So I have lots of tetrahedrons and octahedrons, because they're made of triangles.If you tried to make a circle out of 5 tubes, it wouldn't stay round, but could take most any shape.  When I have used 4-bead circles, I've always kept the cross section a triangle, because then, even if the squares turned into parallelograms, it still couldn't completely lose its shape, and it would remain 3 dimensional.
   However, I've come to realize that while a single cube made out of tubes is pretty apt to not stay much like a cube, a series of them will have more stability.  Also, when I was using oxidized copper tubes I used fireline thread, because there wasn't enough room for monofilament, which is fatter.  But the silver tubes, although they're the same size on the outside, seem to have a thinner wall, so there's room inside for more thread.  So here I used monofilament line to support the corners of the cubes better.  The piece moves alot, but it still holds its shape quite well.  It's big, because I wanted it to just go over the head without a clasp, so the pieces that form the long side of each rectangle are around an inch.  Anyway, I enjoyed doing it, and may do more along that line.  One thing I'd like to do just for comparison, is a simple rectangular necklace like this, but made out of a string of octahedrons instead of cubes.  Then I can see whether a much more rigid piece works as well on the body as one, like this, with more give.

More tetrahedrons

I'm playing with tetrahedrons again.  I'm discovering that being able to cut my own tubes is changing my mindset.  When you work with beads mostly you're saying "what can I do with the beads I have?"  When you can make your own you start to ask "What beads ( or in this case lengths of beads) will do what I want to do?"  I came up with a sequence of tetrahedrons that would produce a very gentle curve.  But by lengthening the tube on the outside of the curve you can make the curve sharper.  But how much to lengthen it?  I did what I could with math--Pythagorean theorem and all that.  But that doesn't completely do it because there's always some looseness in beadwork, and errors build up.  I had

decided I wanted to do a necklace that would go over your head without needing a clasp, but I didn't want it to be too huge either. And the tubing is expensive enough that I can't just keep trying different lengths till I get what I want.
   I played around with coffee stirrer straws (top picture), using 50mm straws for 25mm tubes, 40mm straws for 20mm tubes etc, and could approximate things that way.  For the most part I'd like to stick with cutting my metal tubes in lengths of 5, 10, 15, 20mm etc.  Otherwise it's just too hard to keep track of things.  But for a given piece I can always pick one element (like the tube on the very outside) and make it whatever I need to make the shape come out right.  Anyway, I'm still learning, still having fun.