Star Cluster beaded bead in pink blue olive

Last night my friend Melanie helped me choose colors for this Star Cluster beaded bead. We tried to find a new combination of colors that I haven’t tried before. We started with Pantone’s Live Coral, but ended up with rosy pink, to which we added dark grayish blue and light olive. The olive beads actually flicker in pink. It contains over 450 beads and measures just over an inch from point to point.

Find this piece here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/675222630/star-cluster-beaded-bead-in-pink-blue

Learn to make your own with my tutorial on Cluster Beaded Beads.

Here is a photo of my dog.  He likes belly rubs.

Strand of Purple Beaded Beads

Here's a strand of purple beaded beads with lampwork glass, simply strung on silk cord.

The beaded bead designs include Octahedral Clusters, Nuts and Washers, and Infinity Beads.

 

This strand is sold.  Here's a photo of my dog asking for breakfast.

Thanks for looking.

Octahedral Space Grid Sructure Beaded with Bugle Beads

This large beaded bead is composted of 48 tetrahedron and 36 octahedrons, all arranged into a large octahedral form. It has 8 large triangular holes and is very hollow. The design is based upon the work of J. Francois Gabriel, who wrote about the use of polyhedra in the architecture of high rise buildings.

This beaded object is composed of somewhere between 1300 and 1400 beads.

The beads include sparkling dark bronze bugle beads, and a variety of smaller beads. This beaded art object is very light and a bit fragile, but not so fragile that you can't hold it and play with it. If you drop it on carpet, it should survive the fall unscathed. All of the beads are made from glass. So don't step on it.

It measures about 3 inches across, making it too large for jewelry, but it would make a nice hanging ornament or a piece of jewelry for your computer for you to gaze at while you consider the state of the universe and everything in it.

I started weaving this piece a long while ago, longer than I'd like to admit. It sat half done in a box, for years. Recently, I picked it up, washed it off, and finally finished it. As much as I'm pleased it done, I doubt I will ever make another one without a good reason.

If you would like to have it, you can find it in my Etsy shop. Thanks for looking.

Octahedral Cluster

This is a recent example of one of my all time favorite beaded bead designs, the Octahedral Cluster. Octahedral Clusters all have six stars, like the 6 faces of a cube.  In the beaded bead below, I colored two of the stars silver.

I colored two of the stars black and two of them gold.  Each pair lies on opposite faces.

The points of the stars come together three at a time, one star of each color. There are 8 places on the beaded bead that look just like this.  Four of them are identical, and the other four are mirror images of this.

The beaded bead has the symmetry of an octahedron, which is the same as the symmetry of a cube. Knowing this, you might wonder if this beaded bead is really an octahedron, as I told you, or maybe, it is really a cube. If we look at the largest beads (in green), there are 12 of them.

That could be useful because cubes have 12 edges, but so do octahedrons. In fact, the holes are line segments.  So if you look at the holes of the largest beads, and you extend those lines so that the lines intersect, you will form the 12 edges of an octahedron.  For that reason, I think it is an octahedron, and that is why I call it an Octahedral Cluster.

Here you can see how big it is.

Do you want it?  This beaded bead is for sale.

Do you want to make your own?  The tutorial for the Cube and Octahedral Clusters is available. If you make one of each, then you will really see the difference.

Marsala Beaded Bead Necklace

This necklace features Pantone's 2015 Color of the Year, Marsala with aquamarine blue and titanium gray.

It includes 8 beaded beads: 5 Nuts & Washers, a Cube Cluster, an Octahedral Cluster, and a Conway Bead. I carefully selected 7 lampwork glass beads to make the strand into an asymmetric, yet perfectly balanced strand of beads. That's 15 beads in all. Together they make a pallet that is rich and earthy, sophisticated, and oh-so in fashion.

They're all strung on a yard of blue cord of pure silk that I twisted and plied on my spinning wheel.

It includes almost 6 inches (15 cm) of beads. Largest beaded bead measures almost an inch (23 mm).  Thanks for looking!

Tutorial: Cube and Ocatehdral Clusters PDF Instant Download

At beAd Infinitum, we are still slowly updating our pattern library to make them all available as instant PDF downloads.  We just released the the pattern for the Cube Octahedral Cluster Beaded Beads. These beaded beads are very round and hollow. The larger of the two designs, the Cube Cluster is remarkable stiff.

Here is a new Octahedral Cluster I made for my Etsy shop It has a nice coloring with stars in three different colors.

I added a "golden flaw" to one of the pink stars, but replacing some of the pink beads with 24K plated seed beads because if you're going to have a flaw, it should be a really nice one.

 Thanks for looking!

Ionic Octahedron, Star Cluster and Hyperbolic Surface

Beaded beads that sparkle...

Ionic Octahedron Beaded Bead in Blue and Silver

 

Star Cluster Beaded Bead with Redside Designs Borosilicate Glass

Ionic Octahedron Beaded Bead in Mixed Metals

 Hyperbolic Beaded Angle Weave in Green Gold

Thanks for looking!

Bat Country: A Sierpinski Tetrahedron Jungle Gym

The mathematical sculpture that we made 6 years ago, Bat Country, has been selected as one of the 2013 Burning Man Honorarium Art Projects!  This will be the third time we will have brought the full sculpture to Burning Man.  We are honored in being selected given the number of art grant submissions this year.  Thanks to all who have participated in building Bat Country.

Bat Country is 21’ tall six-sided tetrahedron built from 384 aluminum baseball bats and 130 twelve-inch softballs.  The bats form the structure’s edges; there is one softball at each vertex.

Each edge of the structure measures 26’ in distance.

The structure is designed to be and intended to be climbed upon; ½” threaded steel rod runs through the axis of each bat.  These rods bolt to steel joining plates at each vertex.  This provides structural stability and facilitate transportation and on-site assembly.

The total structure weighs about 2500 lbs.  We placed a blue LED behind each of the 130 softballs. 

Here you can see Bat Country at an art car party at night.

A propane fireball really lights it up.

Mathematically, Bat Country is an example of a third-generation Sierpinski tetrahedron. Waclaw Sierpinski was a 20th century Polish mathematician who pioneered the field of fractal geometry; one of the two-dimensional fractals he described was the Sierpinski triangle. His triangle was one of the first shapes understood to demonstrate self-similarity: the property that its shape at any level is the same as its shape at its largest level. The Sierpinski tetrahedron is a three-dimensional shape realizing the same concept – a tetrahedron is a pyramid with a triangular base.

Bat Country represents the idea of self similarity; the full-scale installation is an assembly of 64 small tetrahedrons. To understand the Sierpinski tetrahedron, consider one tetrahedron, made with six bats, one for each edge, and four balls, one at each corner. With four such tetrahedrons you can assemble a first-generation Sierpinski tetrahedron (requiring 6x4 = 24 bats). If you combine four first-generation tetrahedrons, you get a second-generation tetrahedron (requiring 24x4 = 96 bats). If you combine four of these in turn, you get a third-generation tetrahedron (requiring 96x4 = 384 bats).  This is Bat Country, a third-generation Sierpinski tetrahedron.

It has 1 jumbo tetrahedron, the whole sculpture.  It has 4 large tetrahedrons, with 4 bats on each edge.  It has 4^2 = 16 medium tetrahedrons with 2 bats on each edge.  It has 4^3 = 64 small tetrahedrons made from 6 bats.

In all, there are 1 + 4 + 16 + 64 =  85 tetrahedrons across the 4 sizes.

The negative space between each tetrahedron forms a regular octahedron with eight triangular faces. The largest octahedron, in the center of the sculpture, is about 10’ high. This space, large enough for several people to stand in, serves as an inhabitable ‘room’ inside Bat Country. Self-similarly, four smaller octahedrons, one at the center of each second-generation tetrahedron, are each about 5’ high; there are also sixteen small octahedrons, one inside each of the first-generation tetrahedrons.

So far, we have assembled the full structure three times: The first time was a test build in South San Francisco, and the other two times were at Burning Man 2008 and 2009.

We build it from the bottom up.  It takes a lot of wrenches and hands to work them because this sculpture goes together with a whole lot of bolts.  There is a bolt on both ends of each bat, and 8 more that join 2 steel connectors together where the balls are.  2 x 384 + 8 x 127 = 1784 bolts. 

First we build the bottom layer with 3^4 = 81 bats.  

Then we add another 81 bats to make 27 little tetrahedrons.

Eventually, we get nine first generation Seirpinski tetrahedrons...

... and three second generation Siepinski tetrahedrons.  Then, we erect a scaffold and build the top quadrant on top of the other three.

This is the hard part.

The last bit goes up quickly.

This is some of our campmates and crew. 

This is Bat Country on the night of the Burn in 2009.

In 2010, we brought a quarter of Bat Country to the Playa to pitch at our camp.  I made some shade panels for it like this, and I plan on making a few more this year.  The panels not only provide shade, but make it more visible from a distance.

This is Paul Brown.  He is Bat Country's engineer.

Paul is also my partner.  Here we are together, Paul and me.

 This is me building Bat Country.

Bat Country was originally modeled after my 3 inch tall, beaded Sierpinski tetrahedrons like these.

Thanks for looking!