Wednesday Workshop: Balancing Spikes and Spheres

Wednesday Workshops explore the designs of other jewelry artists, looking for inspiration and enlightenment about jewelry physics and design. The whole series can be found in chronological order here. Today's workshop keeps the focus on shape and examines balance in this Fred Leighton masterpiece. (This image came across my Pinterest feed as 'Diamond Stars and Fringe Necklace,' but sad to say the only one I can find on the website looks a little different.)

Margie Deeb's book on bead design has a whole chapter on shape and training yourself to look closely at the shapes that make up a piece of jewelry and the shape of the piece as a whole. This Leighton necklace takes two shapes that are fundamentally opposed and makes them dance together beautifully.

Spheres are soothing shapes, regular and perfect and predictable. They speak of comfort and completion. They're weighty shapes, solid and final as the punctuation at the end of a sentence. Spikes meanwhile are dangerous, sharp, irregular, alarming. But when those solid spheres come to rest on the points of those dangerous spikes, the effect is nothing short of celestial. The spheres seem to float, small planets in a sky full of stars (even without the star shapes hanging below). Longer and shorter spikes allow the lower curve of the necklace to expand into still more negative space, keeping the overall shape fluid, dynamic rather than static. The star shapes add a bit more danger back into the mix, even as their points call back to the spikes in the rest of the necklace, leading to a feeling of completion and deliberate structure. Every part of this necklace has something to say to every other part—and at the same time, the piece as a whole has an impact completely separate from the individual components.

Try this on:

• Instead of using two contrasting shapes, use two variants of one shape. For instance: long thin isosceles triangles versus short, stubby equilateral triangles.
• Add color. But where? Should the spheres be one hue and the spikes another contrasting color? Or should the necklace as a whole show a gradient? Perhaps light on the outside and brighter on the inside?
• Double the width of the band and make this a bold cuff bracelet. Something that creeps like ice up the wrist. Something a faerie queen might wear to dazzle the hearts of her enemies.

Wednesday Workshop: Coloring Outside the Lines

Being good at obeying the rules means it's easy for me to follow patterns online and from beading books, which has been a great boon as a mostly self-taught creator. I was never the kid who colored outside the lines: I was the kid who learned about shading and point pressure and cross-hatching, who was careful to keep each area of color separate from its neighbor. I liked the freedom to choose colors within the limits of that black-line shape. I liked having a structure to react against -- it was safer. Being limitless felt eerily like being out in space, adrift without a ship to anchor me. I liked the secure feeling of gravity tugging at me, even as I dreamt of flying. But rules, even laws, even the law of gravity -- sometimes they're made to be broken.

The repetitive rhythm and geometric architecture of beadweaving bears the risk of confining me to symmetry and rigidity. Old habits make me flounder a bit when asked to strike out on my own into the blue. It's profoundly helpful to see work like David Chatt's October Bracelet, which takes the regularity of cubic right-angle weave and explodes it into a symphony of chaos and visual surprise.

On the one hand: squares, right? Symmetrical squares, each side identical to every other, the most static shape in all the visual world. And cubic right-angle weave is a set of squares made of smaller squares -- it treats the beads as building blocks, and makes cube shapes out of round beads.

David Chatt has taken the most predictable shape in beadweaving and exploded it.

We have precisely one unity here: there's the individual cubic RAW unit, which has an echo in the large rectangular outline of the bracelet as a whole. That's it. Everything between those  -- color, balance, texture, rhythm -- appears improvised and haphazard. Oranges, purples, and a little bit of gold-green dance around one another, sans focal. Spiral shapes and waffled areas and little zigzagging hops of cubes resting on top. Some shapes are layered on top of one another, others intertwine, others nestle against one another like lovers. I could stare at this piece for weeks and not see every detail. It really is an astonishing piece of art, and a spur to get myself out of whatever rut I find myself in, design-wise.

Try this on:

• Diane Fitzgerald's geometric shapes: cylinder beads are basically pixels, and there's a lot of color possibilities within the framework of a rigid structure.
• Bead netting: netting is such a simple stitch, but simplicity here is the foundation for ambition.
• Pearls in a rainbow of sizes and colors: right-angle weave or sculptural peyote could make a frothy, feminine masterpiece.

Wednesday Workshop: Repeating Shapes, Varying Colors

Today's Wednesday Workshop features a pair of Emma Stine earrings found via Pinterest. This piece shows us a useful lesson about balancing repetition and variation in design.

Note how the earrings are made of identical shapes in three different colors: deep rose, pale rose, and white. The designer has put the highest contrast in the center by putting the bright white-and-metal marquise on top of the deep rose crystal marquise, making the center of the earring the focal point -- a strong design choice. The pale rose marquise frames the contrast and completes the color and shape story (we love the Rule of Three even in visual design). The round post mounts at the top echo the pattern (three colors, brightest in the middle with a pale rose frame) but don't compete with the power of the marquise shape.

Try this on:

• Peyote hexagons and round rings, much as I love building them, aren't going to work as well for this shape story: they leave too much space on either side, which will unbalance the design. Rectangles and ovals, though, could be used in similar ways. For instance, a quick pendant design sketch:
• Another idea would be to vary the order of the shapes -- put the bright white marquise in the center as a focal, flanked by several marquises of deep rose, and then straps of pale rose marquises to either side for a necklace or bracelet.

Cathedral Garden Bracelet

Next up in my continuing obsession with peyote shapes à la Diane Fitzgerald: this bracelet inspired by the idea of a lavender garden outside a grey stone Gothic cathedral!

The amethyst emerald-cut Swarovski crystals are a vintage set I bought on clearance and have had waiting around forever: here's a similar set currently available on Etsy.

On the whole I believe this bracelet is a success: it has a delicacy and an antique flavor that are very appealing. I've worn it with a couple of outfits and enjoyed the slide of the metallic hex Delicas against my wrist. However, there are a few points I would try and fix in a second version:

Definitely a design to revisit and revise in future!

Roads Not Taken:

• This piece has a lot of room for variation: round rivolis matched with peyote rings, for instance, or pear-shaped stones mixed with peyote teardrops (reversed in orientation, to keep the rhythm regular). 
• Could also do one larger central stone with empty shapes to either side. Hexagons and honeycomb colors might be splendid here.
• Also: could build a puzzle bracelet out of only the empty shapes, with varying colors in the center and silver to bridge the shapes together. Could be quietly dazzling.

The Queen of the Night

The movie Amadeus has a lot to say about what it means to be an artist. We are shown two men who work in the same medium -- music -- but whose approaches to their art are dramatically and tragically opposed. Our narrator Salieri is religious, rigid, a trained expert with an almost mathematical approach to composition. Unfortunately for Salieri, he lives in a time and a city contemporary with the legendary Amadeus Mozart, a man of such natural genius that he waves a hand and perfect constellations of notes appear on the page. As depicted in the film, Mozart is childish, lecherous, rebellious, heedless, and completely, ridiculously talented. Salieri descends into an increasingly vicious spiral of bitterness and envy; Mozart's naïveté and blind enthusiasm lead him headlong into danger and misery and one of the saddest screen deaths you'll ever see. The trick, of course, is that a great artist must be both Salieri and Mozart.

You've got to have talent—but you've also got to have the discipline to use that talent as best you can. Imagine what Salieri could have done with Mozart's gift for easy composing. Imagine what Mozart could have done with Salieri's drive and ability to focus (and climb the social ladder in the imperial court). Mozart squanders his potential literally farting around Vienna, and dies with one of his greatest works unfinished. Salieri labors too much over the form of his pieces: they sound difficult and forced and even semi-idiot emperor Franz Joseph can tell something's missing.

Mozart is able to find artistic inspiration in everything. A cruel tirade from his mother-in-law becomes one of history's most well-known coluratura pieces, commonly known as the Queen of the Night aria (though technically she has another aria in the opera as well):

It's a beautiful, impossible set of notes and it gives me chills every time I hear it. Especially because set designers usually pull out all the stops for this one, as in this design for an 1815 production of The Magic Flute:

Look at those colors! The celestial dome of stars above and sunset clouds of chaos beneath! The weight of that tiny black figure in the center! I could stare at this painting for hours.

Naturally, I've been dreaming of a Queen of the Night-inspired piece of jewelry for some time now. It'll probably have to be several pieces, because there are too many possibilities of color, shape, and style that I want to explore. (Same goes for Botticelli's Birth of Venus, which I've turned into a bangle, a pendant, and three necklaces so far.)

But I have to start somewhere, and I still have that stash of crystal I mentioned before, so we're going to start with something simple.

It is -- not bad! A little imprecise in its execution. I need to pay better attention to my bezel maths and try to either center things more concretely or lean into the zig-zag. But the moon-bezel idea worked out rather well, so that part of the experiment is a success!

Until next time I shall, like Salieri, endeavor to practice.

Roads Not Taken:

• I could not think of a proper rope to match this pendant. That needs fixing in future iterations.
• The astronomical color palette is satisfying, but I can't help wondering what the gradients would do in flashy pinks and greens and golds.
• Turn this pendant sideways and make the center sizes larger, and you'd have a pretty stunning bracelet. That might be the thing I try next, to be honest -- a full silver/white/AB moon in the center, and smaller, darker moons fading away to either side.

Rivoli Play Time

Bezeled crystal rivolis: I love them. Love making them, love wearing them. They have the individuality and creativity of handcrafted jewelry, with the sparkle and glamor of big-budget pieces. Over the years I've bought a ton of Swarovski on clearance, found vintage treasures on Etsy, and even scored some discontinued or sample crystal stones from a friend who works for  a local retailer. I love to pull all these shinies out and run my hands through them, like a greedy pirate with a treasure chest. But I'm not as good about actually using them. I never want to turn the glittering potential into something that doesn't live up to my hopes. I'm trying to be better about this: all the bead dreams in the world won't do you any good if you never actually make anything.

So: I started with an inspiration -- there to the left.

Nice, right? Modern but raw, asymmetric, just the right balance between minimalist and decadent. And totally recreateable with beads: an important consideration.

I realized I had amassed an accidental collection of rivolis of various shapes in shades of blue and green; I pulled out Delicas in a spectrum of gold and amber and went to work. The result? This lovely thing below, which I'm calling the Rivoli Puzzle Bracelet, because putting all the pieces together was something of a puzzle. What started as a pendant or a brooch had to become a bracelet when I realized there was no way this collection of stones could be made symmetrical.

I have taken a couple classes from the great Laura McCabe, whose peyote bezeling technique is unparalleled. (Both books also highly recommended.) There's a bit of improvisation at play here -- navettes are still a bit of a bastard to put bezels around -- but on the whole I think it's one of the most successful pieces I've ever made. I plan on wearing it to every holiday party I'm invited to this year.

The big question as I finished the final bezel was this: how to embellish the peyote base? Ultimately, as with the Citrus Mess bracelet, I decided against embellishment, counting on the shape and color variations to give the piece movement and interest. Any embellishment I thought of sounded fussy and overdone, and would ruin the quiet strength of the developing piece.

Roads Not Taken:

• One thing I learned is that putting a bright solid-color bezel around a lighter unfoiled rivoli means you get reflections, like pebbles on the bottom of a pond. Definitely something I want to try again in a more deliberate way.
• I would love to get stones and Delicas in two contrasting colors and play around with intensity, such as the coral and green colors in this pin.
• Alternatively, I would like to get a set of identical stones and then add embellishment details, such as in this lovely Lalique bracelet.

How To Work Through Beader's Block

Everyone knows about writer's block. It's an evil little bastard and no mistake. Every writer falls prey to it at some point in their life, myself included. What it's taken me shamefully long to realize is that it has a damnable little cousin: beader's block.

And for the past two weeks, I've been pickling in it.

Symptoms: beader's block is most easily recognized by a sudden and universal dissatisfaction with the efforts of one's creative labor. Designs that fall apart between theory and execution; color schemes that shine in the tube but fall flat on the Fireline; time-intensive projects that grow stale with repetition; finished pieces that feel like amateur work by someone who shows no talent, imagination, or passion for the craft. Side effects may include but are not limited to: despondency, self-flagellation, and impractical purchases of new beads in frantic hope that new shiny things will dispel the clouds that are blinding you.

In the past fortnight I have started and then set aside/taken apart the following pieces:

• two-drop peyote bracelet with size 8 silver hex Delicas: has potential but is super-irritating to work on, for some reason
• gold hex bezels for a pair of long rectangular teal Swarovski stones
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (peyote and brick): colors were phenomenal together but execution was lacking
• perennial "no but really this should work this time" seed bead swirl project inspired by an ancient metal torque
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (netting)
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (Russian spiral)
• attempt to replicate something like Miguel Ases' brick-stitched astonishments

Everything's felt like a complete and utter mess.

But if writing has taught me anything, it is this: the only way out is through.

Planning hadn't worked. Trying to fit an idea to the inspiration had failed me. So I threw myself in the opposite direction as hard as I could. I set out deliberately to make a mess. No real design, no planning, just grabbing things and putting them together.

I arranged to have a crafternoon with a friend (check out her amazing plush-making Tumblr Unicorn Conglomerate), got together all my beads, every box of Delicas and seed beads and shapes and my giant shoebox of crystal. And then I essentially dicked around for two hours, stewing in my own sense of failure. It wasn't pretty, believe me. But eventually a stray thought came sneaking in, like a dribble of ink in the water: last week's Project Runway wedding dress challenge had featured one dress in a sunshine yellow. The final product had been roundly hated by the judges and got one of the designers sent home. I remembered thinking at the time that if they'd paired the yellow with a neutral -- say, gray -- the effect might have been more sophisticated. Yellow-and-gray as a color combination has been the one thing I've enjoyed seeing in fashion's current and hopefully now over obsession with neon pastels. But I haven't bought anything in that combo myself -- so why not, I thought, make myself something in that palette?

And look, here I have a handful of Swarovski crystal polygons in sunflower and light gray square stones (both now apparently discontinued, so I probably got these on clearance). I like the contrast between bright-and-rough and neutral-and-sleek. I find seed beads in a matte silver to match. And then I begin bezeling one of the sunflower stones.

It's wrong. Again.

But it's a better kind of wrong. I notice that what I like about the stones -- their edginess and the way that interacts with the blandness of the gray squares -- will be lost if I hide them in bezels. I decide right-angle-weave might be a better way to go, and I dump the beads in a pile. Then I start lining them up, piling them back, and lining them up again. I poke at them for a bit, enjoying the clink and the weight of them, and reluctant to spoil this by actually stringing them on something. At some point I realize I have accidentally created a semi-symmetrical pattern, and also that I have some smaller crystal rondelles in similar shades that I could use to create a band.

The right-angle-weave takes some arranging to get the proportions right, and then I go back through and fill in the gaps between units and to add more Fireline support to the crystral structure. (Fireline, I love you, please tell me these colored versions of you are as good as I hope.) All the while I'm planning on doing netted embellishment along the lines of my Cathedral Pendant -- but then I tie off my thread and I look at the mess I've made and it's too glorious and simple and if I add one more bead I may ruin it.

So I do something I almost never do: I stop. And here is the result.

I call it the Citrus Mess. Pictures don't quite do justice to the way the bracelet catches the light and seems to change shape from different angles -- it definitely lives in movement and has quite a lot of shine. And weight. An intensely pleasurable piece to wear. And immediately after finishing it I had another idea for a way to make cephalopod suckers out of seed beads and I tried it and it worked and that is definitely going to come up in future posts.

Roads Not Taken:

• I definitely want to experiment more with large chunky crystals and freeform right-angle-weave. It's a very forgiving way to play with color variations in a quick and satisfying way.
• Had I more of the large crystals, I would play with proportions more in individual units. Mix up larger and smaller beads, for instance, and see just how abstract I could get with it.
• Smaller crystals could easily have been set diagonal-wise into the empty spaces in the center of each RAW unit. I opted not to this time in the interest of simplicity, but if I were using more regular-shaped beads and/or had not wound the central units so tightly, it would be an excellent way to add more texture to the center of the piece.
• This would make an amazing three-strand necklace base as well.