stars

On my recent boat trip, I was playing around with  some new ideas.  One of them was stellations.  I made an ornament by making an icosahedron and stellating it by turning each triangle into a tetrahedron.  I liked it, but as it was almost 3" in diameter it wasn't very practical as jewelry.  Then something occurred to me. The icosahedron at the center of it was made up of groups of 5 triangles that formed pentagons coming to a point at the center.  If I took one of those groups of triangles, and made it point inward instead of outward, I'd have a flat side that could lay against the body.  Then I could stellate all the rest of the triangles.  Voila!  Of course, these star forms still extend out quite a ways from the body, but I kind of like that.  I also made a few where the 5 tetrahedrons at the center of the star are made from shorter tubes, and so don't stick out so far, but for the big necklace I decided to stick with the long tubes.

Canal trip

 I don't usually write blog posts about non-artsy things, but just this once I couldn't resist.  My husband and I are leaving in a couple of days for a month exploring the canals of northern England, and maybe a bit of Wales.   A friend and fellow jewelry artist, Lauran Sundin, ( and by the way you should check out her beautiful jewelry at lauransundin.com) owns the boat pictured here.  She and her husband spend several months on it each year, traveling the English canals. That's her in the pictures. My husband and I are long-time boat people.  We spent a year on a small sailboat (in our youth), 

bringing it down the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes.  Anyway, Lauran and her husband Steve offered us the use of the boat this summer, so we're off on another boating adventure.  As you can see from the pictures, though, this one will be really pastoral and quiet, mostly visiting small towns, and traveling the countryside and going up and down the hills ye means of teeny locks that you crank open and shut by hand.  That's one in the second picture  We'll start out near Manchester, which is where we're flying to.    I'm taking lots of silver tubes with me, and I
plan to experiment and play with designs, but

not to expect to actually produce a lot of jewelry on the boat.

Rolling Bridge Necklace

One structure that I totally love is the Rolling Bridge in Paddington Basin, London.  If you don't know it here's a video link www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIl0bzyQD0.  It's a pedestrian bridge designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and it's just the most elegant structure.  I was telling a friend about it, and suddenly realized that it was a great inspiration for a necklace.  This was also a perfect idea because my husband and I are leaving in a week or so for a month in England.  We'll be up north around Manchester, so I won't actually get to see

the rolling bridge, but it still seemed just right to have a necklace inspired by a British structure.
  This one is  all octahedrons.  Like the bridge, it has 8 sections.  It's not quite finished ( I need to make more chain links, and I've ordered a hook clasp) but when it's done the clasp will be right where the chain meets the "bridge," That way you can hook it to just 1 end of the bridge and it will look like picture 1, or to both ends and it will be rolled up like picture 2.  The only way to get it to be totally straight like the bridge is to hang it upside down, like picture 3, but it's actually a bit long for that (around 7"), so that's mostly theoretical.
  I didn't initially plan on using the seed beads, but I was forgetting that if the individual octs are allowed to pivot any way they want they'll tend to hang with the longer, and heavier, beads down.  The bead

chains keep that from happening.  I'm used to using much bigger seed beads, but they would have made the strings of beads much too bulky.  Fortunately, FMG had once sent me a container of #15 beads in just the right iridescent gray, as one of their free gifts along with an order.  I almost didn't keep them, thinking  "what would I ever do with these tiny things?"  But it's hard to throw away free beads, so they were still in my stash, and worked out just right.
  That reminds me--if anyone knows of interesting galleries, artist, sbead stores etc. in the Manchester...Liverpool-ish area, I'd love to know about them.  Actually, our mobility will be pretty limited, as we'll be on a narrow boat on the canals up there, but you never know. 

Playing with an idea

Still playing with my chains of squarish octahedrons.  The last one I did, and posted about, was not as deep (that is, not as 3 dimensional, not standing up as far off the body) as most of my work.  The tubes to give it depth were 10 mm long.  Here I used more or less the same structure, but with tubes of 15 mm. They changed the geometry enough that once again the octs zigzag a bit, but that was fine here.
   It had occurred to me that you could also use those tubes as hinges and join rows of octs just at those hinges.  So that was what I did here.
   Then I started thinking of other beads I could use for the "waist" beads.  A while ago I had gotten strings and strings of marble beads on sale, and hadn't done a lot with them.  So I thought I'd try those.
  I had 2 sizes, 35mm long and 30 mm long.  I tried the larger ones first and got the structure you see here.  The ends of the marble beads were pretty wide, so I added a bronze colored bead to give a narrower end.  It came out quite zigzaggy, which I liked.  But the 35mm beads were awfully heavy, a

and I was afraid if I made a whole necklace like that it would be uncomfortable.
   I tried using the 30mm marble beads, and to keep more or less the same proportions, I changed the silver tubes from 25mm to 20mm.  The next picture shows that one.  I liked it, but somehow didn't decide to do a whole necklace like that.  But I thought that  single one made a great pendant, so I just finished off the one, and I'm putting that on etsy.










  What I finally ended up with was using the smaller (30mm) marble beads, and 25mm silver tubes.  That made each oct more

square, so I changed the 2 tubes on each outside face  to 20mm ones, and got just enough curve.  It's not quite finished, but here's a preview.  Each 2-oct structure is 2" long, so I'll have 9 of them hinged together.
  The fun part of all this is to take an idea and watch it evolve, and see what you can do with it.

New octahedron piece

This is sort of a follow up on a post I did in January.  In that post I showed and talked about a necklace I had made in which I built octahedrons sized so that adjoining faces were almost at right angles to one another.  Each oct had a "waist" made of 2 short ( 10mm) tubes and 2 long gold filled tubes.  The angles weren't quite right angles because the 25mm gold filled tubes weren't quite long enough to be hypotenuses.  That would have required tubes of about 27mm, and I like to use stock sizes where I can.  So  on the sides of the piece the octs zigzagged a bit.
  In that post I mentioned wanting to use this idea to make a piece that was something on the order of a tic-tac-toe grid.  When I started to do it with the zigzagging rows of octs, I found that the intersecting rows weren't quite at right angles to one another.  To get that, I really did need octs that had right angles between their faces, so using the same 20 mm beads on the non-waist edges, I really did need 27mm waist tubes.
  It turns out the perfect solution was to use a 25mm tube with  a #11 seed bead at each end.  I wanted to use my anodised aluminum tubes instead of the gold filled ones, so that each chain of octs would have a different color, and I've found that with the aluminum tubes I'm pretty much always happier if I put a seed bead at each end of the tube.  That's because the aluminum tubes are quite a bit fatter than the silver ones, and so the open hole at each end of the tube is unattractive.  The addition of the seed beads solved both problems.

Asymmetrical silver tetrahedrons

Seems to me that I have a way of announcing in a blog post that I plan to do A and then immediately doing B.  Like I'll say I want to get away from symmetry and the next thing I know I've done 3 or 4 symmetrical pieces. Or vice versa. Just a few posts ago I said I wanted to make pieces using sort of stock lengths of tubing instead of cutting custom lengths for an individual piece, because if I get the geometry wrong, I'm left with odd length pieces that don't work and that could  produce a lot of waste. So what did I do next but make the most custom length piece I've made so far.  I'm sure there's a CAD-CAM program out there that could have figured out the proper lengths for me, but, of course, I don't have one.  For this one I drew the inside oval and the outside asymmetrical curve on graph paper, and then drew the triangles it would take to join them.  This gave me an approximation of the lengths I would need, but only that.  Beyond that it was pretty seat-of-the-pants. I've been mostly oxidizing my silver so I don't have to think about tarnish, but for this one I had no choice but to use bright silver, because I was cutting 2 or 3 lengths at a time, and there's no sensible way to oxidize the tubes that way. (If I were still working with copper, I could oxidize as I go, because copper doesn't need hot water to oxidize, but for silver you need very hot water, close to boiling.  I guess I could keep a liver of sulphur bath hot if I used a hot plate, but I just use a pot with a coil immersed in the water, so I can only heat plain water, and when it starts to cool I throw the bath out.) Also if I oxidized a tube and then had to shorten it a bit,I'd be left with 1 bright edge, and I'd have to oxidize it again.  Anyway, I like this one in bright silver anyway, so it worked out alright.  the longest tubes in it, by the way are 62 mm, or around 2.5" long.

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.