geometric shapes

These 2 pieces have been on my mental drawing board for a while now. Finally made them. The green one is mostly about the stones, and the various greens. The other one is me starting to put together some of the shapes I've figured out. I like the look of the stone beads, but it sure is a pain to find the holes in them. Partly it's just that I need a better light, I think. It's OK for most things, but not for finding holes in beads. Black onyx are the worst!

Asymmetrical tube necklace

This is my newest tube necklace made from my nickel silver beads. I was pretty pleased with it. I had to work hard on it to push myself toward an asymmetrical design. I tore it apart several times till I got it where I wanted it. But in the course of it I learned alot about how to make the tubes do what you want them to do.

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.