It’s remarkable how this just-published illusion actually illustrates EXACTLY why I couldn’t see what Rick-Rack really was.

All of those lines are just wavy, but the way the colours arrange tell you whether to see them that way, or perceive them as Zigged.

Our Rick-Rack turned out to be no different. It’s just a straight line that is scrunched up for convenience, mating, (or in our case, geometric beauty and fitting). Takahashi Zigged his line visually, we did it with physical materials. Perhaps his way is most elemental, because it is communication in light.

This is monkey-and-stick stuff, in comparison (but more fun I think):

What I learned about fitting zigged things is that lines are just lines, whether wavy, straight or zigged. The little things we do to them (or appear to do to them) aren’t important to their nature.

Finite lines are static moments, little tools of creation, pieces of infinite lines, planes or circles. We use lines here on Earth because we are in a constructed reality and we need static forms like tables, rulers, mathematics. They are all tools to help us measure, build, divide and grow.

Lines work for you: you get to decide what they look like, and what they look like is what work they do in our 3D space.

Read about Takahashi’s simple, glorious discovery here.

Also, a huge Cooper’s Hawk just flew down into my garden, turning a lot of random seed-eating finches into a coherent traveling wave of flight. From the many, into one. Geometry is beautiful!

Beady greetings from a snowy Boston!

We’re still a few months from going to press with the Pattern Book (thank you for your continued patience) but things are moving quickly now. It’s wonderful, thinking of finally being able to share these years of work.

Just a refresher reminder, if this is popping up in your email, it is because you’ve subscribed to this blog. If you are not subscribed, entering your email in the “Follow” box on the right-hand side of the screen (and then confirming your email afterward) will put you on the mailing list.

May I dazzle you with a beautiful simple Kaleidocycle by Claudia Furthner, beading from Austria? This one is done in size 10 cylinder beads.

Isn’t it wonderful? The photos are all of the same piece at different points in turning inward or outward. It’s made from 24 Flat Peyote Triangles, which join up into three sets of mirror Tetrahedra. We’ll share this pattern publicly as soon as it’s graphed.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it yet, we have a nice pattern for a Kaleidocycle in our Pattern Library, if you want to try making one. The pattern posted was our first team sketch showing hinges, and was done by Dustin Wedekind and Kim Van Antwerp. It will be in the book, along with Claudia’s and a suite of other machines and assembly methods.

> > < <

Schedule note: I’ll be at the Martin Gardener mathematics conference in Atlanta this April, showing our Cycles and Machines, and demonstrating new concepts from the project. It’s kind of perfect, as Doris Schattschneider (who co-created the Esher Kaleidocycles origami book that got us all beading these) is actually a featured guest speaker. It will be fun to show her where her book took us. Thanks much to Gwen Fisher for inviting me to go!

Look also for a preview from the new books in the June issue of Perlen Poesie magazine. We’re working with their team now to present one of our Flying Triangles (which feature a technique we began exploring this fall, inserting pre-made Hypars/Warped Squares into slits opened along peyote increases). The piece in the magazine is by Joke Van Biesen, beading from the Netherlands.

Summer news soon!

Hello all!

We’ve got some announcements coming this week. Full day workshops with an international team of CGB beaders will be available during the last two weeks of July in Boston, and in October, we are getting up a large gathering in France during the week of October 5-11.

We’ll have a schedule up soon with signups, and we’ll post it here and on our Facebook page as soon as we get our details sorted.

In an upcoming issue of Perlen Poesie magazine, Joke Van Biesen will show how to place Hypars into a simple Flat Peyote Triangle to make energetic origami-style folding, rolling, flying forms.

https://www.perlen-poesie.com/

This is a little video Joke took of one of the stunning results.

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Also, this coming week here on the Book Blog, we start the Casting Pod Bead-Along, in which we’ll show you, step-by-step, exactly how to start a Rick-Rack or an All-Wing perfectly to size every time, and with no cold start. Stay tuned!

Coming tomorrow – the CGB PodCast BeadAlong! Join us?

Don’t worry about supplies. You only need a couple of grams of cylinder beads and a few dozen round beads (size 8 are best) to create the little Casting Model form. It whips up quickly, but wait until we show you what we DO with it! We might keep you busy for months.

We’ll post tomorrow (March 22) here and on our CGB Facebook page too, with full step by step photos and a discussion, so if you have questions about how to build this tiny little All-Wing, please save them until you see the full spreads? (If you want to print this out, use this link, it will give you a PDF.  (Remember, though, this is just a preview.)

Our little model uses 12 of any kind of 8° round beads (I used dark gold) and three colours of 11° cylinder beads.

For my cylinders, I used Delicas, and chose white (DB351) orange (DB1780, 795) and a dark colour – blue, black or purple work well (DB 696, 10, 756). If you aren’t very familiar with this kind of build, don’t be tempted to use only one colour, because that could make a simple thing confusing.

The Model is a re-usable form, and so should be nice to look at, but it isn’t the PIECE, so don’t think too much about the beads you use to make it.

My guess is that you will make a handful of these sproingy little miracles once you see all that they can do….

Hello all! At this link, please find a downloadable, printable PDF for our PodCast BeadALong. If you have questions about the pattern, please leave them here in the comments. I will be online all week to answer them, and to help everyone make the Casting Model and take off their first Casts. The Pod beads up quickly, as does the first casting.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD PDF

If you only need a short summary to bead this, we posted it yesterday. It’s just 8-12 rounds (depending on your general bangle size) of circular peyote on a base ring of size 8 round beads. The first round of increase beads are double-square-stitched to the ring, providing a sturdy foundation for the peyote to grow. This ring structure allows the Pod to self-organize its Points, instead of you having to sort and wrangle them.

This weekend, when everyone has had a chance to make the PodCast Bead, I’ll upload a video addressing questions and showing how to use this marvel (and other Casting Models too) to create new starts, and lots of them. We greatly appreciate all of your participation; this is how CGB works, and your feedback in these community explorations is how we know if we’re communicating. Zigged forms can be hard to get our minds around.

Below is a sneak peek at our first project off of the Pod, a removable Rick-Rack Bangle that we will bead directly onto the Pod. At this point, our Rick-Rack is still attached to the Model. The little black beads at the tip of the purple increases are just a few Exploding Round beads I added in the first round of the new piece to help me separate the cast from the Pod.

The Exploding Round is a Deconstruction technique from CGB, Volume II  – I’ll show you how that works (and some other ways to remove the work as well) in the next post, tomorrow. In fact, we’ll be making an entire Exploding Set directly onto this crazy little bead. You won’t believe it.

Have fun!
Kate

Above, our PodCast Bead sample, built to 10 rounds,
with 6 rounds of yellow and orange Rick-Rack beaded on top of it. 

Let’s investigate how to use the little Podcast Bead to cast off a Rick-Rack Bangle.

I’m making a video this weekend to answer questions and demonstrate all of the casts and the Deconstructions, so feel free to leave your comments, questions, and requests down below.

As we saw yesterday, I beaded my sample Pod to 10 beads per side. This is the size chart from the pattern, with just one bead per side difference in starts. There is so much room for adjustment with this technique that these starts are meant to be approximate, no more. But remember that for bangles, we’re talking hand size here, not wrist. I have an XS wrist, but a medium hand, so I chose a medium count.

The first bangle I cast off was just like the edge of the PodCast Bead – 6 peaks, with 10 beads per side. Your side count may be different, if you are a different hand size.

By the way, don’t worry if this first bangle cast doesn’t fit you. It probably will, but if it doesn’t, it will be the only one you cast that doesn’t. And you can make it into a beautiful flower, and give it to someone you love. This is low-stakes experimenting, because each new start beads up so quickly.

Are you surprised, by the way, that the Rick-Rack looks so much bigger than the little Pod once we remove it? If so, just look at the photo at top right, and remember that all Zigged things are potentially folding things. The Rick-Rack is folded to fit onto the Pod.

(If you don’t believe your eyes, just count the beads. The Rick-Rack is exactly the size of the edge of the 10-bead PodCast- 6 points, at 10 beads per point.)

This size fits me really well – I have to wiggle into it just a bit. I can tell that if I wanted to build it an inch taller, I’d need a bigger start – maybe 11 beads. And if I wanted a tall cylinder, I might want to start with 12, or even 13 beads.

It would all depend on what I wanted to end up with.

. . .

The first Deconstruction method I want to show you is the simplest one for zig-zag forms like these – all we do is leave a few beads on the end of some points to cut off later, when we are ready to separate the pieces.

Let’s begin the six-round Rick-Rack shown above directly onto the PodCast, using a new thread. Do not weave in your thread to secure it, just start beading. Use any beads you like! I used white, yellow, orange and gold.

Why not weave in your thread? Because the entire starting thread will be removed when we separate the Rick-Rack cast. Why make it harder by burying the tail in the Pod? I only leave an inch, really, just enough to tug on if the starting beads get loose.

How does this work, you may ask, removing an entire THREAD?  It’s because two rounds of thread go through each peyote round. One installs the round, and the other installs the round after it. We will only cut the first thread, the one that installs it. That thread will be easy to find, because we are going to catch it in the beads we abandon at the tip of each Decrease Point.

Lookie:

top side with all increases


bottom side will be all decreases, except for two round increase beads
placed at each Decrease point in the first round only, to aid in removing the Rick-Rack.
x

ROUND 1
Go ahead and bead the first round just like an All-Wing, with increases on each point, but choose one half of the points and put round beads onto the increases. On the other half, use Delicas.

(Try not to bead any of this too tightly, as it makes it hard to get into the thread. All of this work, from the PodCast to the casts, should be done with medium tension at most – you want your Pod springy and your casts supple.)

ROUND 2-6
Beginning in the second round, switch to Decreases on the half of the bangle that has round placeholders. All this means is passing through the last two (white) beads to draw them together on the next round, instead of adding more beads. In this way, my Rick-Rack will grow upward, but always remain 10 beads per side. (There is a photo at the end of the post that shows a Decrease in process, if you have questions about this.)

Below, you can see that I used two black Delica beads instead of nice fat rounds for my initial Detonation placeholders when building this Rick-Rack on my Pod. It doesn’t matter. Any bead or beads will work for this job, but rounds are easier to cut off, so I recommend using them if this is your first Deconstruction.

Below is a Zigged Flower Puff in process (oh, I admit it’s actually the yellow and orange Rick-Rack tied into a flower shape, with a new piece growing on it, to tempt you into further experiments…) but whatever you want to call it, you can see how Decreases work if you look at the thread in progress.

Instead of adding new beads at the end of the point, you pass through the two end beads from the previous round with your thread.

Also, a Flower Puff is a good idea.  : )

For those of you accustomed to making Rick-Racks, you may notice that this is going to be an unusual cast… I’ve only planned for three Decrease Points here, instead of six….

One of the nice things about building on steady forms like this (instead of designing long cold starts) is that you can do interesting things like craft Rick-Racks with different Point sizes without having to plan for the deviations. I am thinking that three of these peaks in my new green Rick-Rack will be ten beads, but the other three will be different.

All three of them could be different, just depending on how high I build each of them before switching to Decreases, or I could leave all three of them Increases, to have half All-Wing, half Rick-Rack. I don’t have to decide until I come to each Point in question.

Just a few thoughts to put into your head for the video that comes next!

If Deconstruction is a completely new idea to you, and you’d like to see evidence of how it works, have a peek at Kim Van Antwerp demonstrating how to separate beadwork by snipping the threads between Increase beads.

Good morning from a sunny springy morning in Boston.

Thanks much to everyone who is beading PodCast Beads along with us, asking questions, finding joy, confusion, or enlightenment in the project. Each are valuable!

In this photo, I show one of the many ways to use the Pods. To take off a Rick-Rack cast that is smaller than the edges of the form, simply turn around for your Decreases before you get to the end of each side. The Pod doesn’t mind.

To do this, and still easily remove your new piece, when installing your first round travel down a few of the extra beads (or to the end of the Pod, as I did here) and abandon a big round bead (or something else you can cut off) at the end of each Decrease Point.

Cutting these beads off later will cut the Installation Thread from Round 1, free those tips, and allow you to remove the new cast with ease when you are ready. Feel free to build the entire new form on the Pod, but only if you know it will fit!

Until you are sure about fit, just take small casts.

Six rounds is the minimum to bead before removal, if you want a sturdy start. Each round you add in Folded Form like this is really easy to handle – if you’ve made Winged or Zigged pieces before, you know how sprawly they can be, and how a working thread likes to catch on the loose points.

I often leave my Casts on my Models for quite a while, just for convenience. Remember, though, this is ONLY if you know that they will fit. Until then, do a few casts in different sizes, so you can understand what Six Points in a Zigged form means to your own hand, wrist and plans for your pieces.

. . .

It’s also possible to tie your Casts up into Flower or Pod forms, and either work them this way, finish them this way, or use them to cast new pieces from. In the photo below, the Pod on the right is a Rainbow All-Wing (shown below, being created on my original PodCast Bead) tied gently at both ends (I put round beads in between the Wingtips when I tie them together, to be gentle to my beads) birthing a beautiful golden Rick-Rack.

It was easy for me to step up a bead size from the All-Wing, because All-Wings naturally go up a bead per Side as they build. So the next round off of my 10-bead-per-side PodCast Bead, if it was an All-Wing (all increases) would be 11 beads per side. If it was a Rick-Rack I was casting, then the side count would stay the same, 10 beads.

Going up only one bead per side is, for me,  just enough of an increase in my size to be able to build my golden Rick-Rack a few inches high, and still get my hand through.

To build a tall cylinder, I would have to account for the entire circumference of my folded hand, and so I personally would need a 12-bead start for this. There is no math that needs to be done, and to tables to consult to determine size this way. Just by your taking off two quick casts, and trying them on, we can tell all we need to help you choose.

Hand sizes are so different than wrist sizes that it can get really complex trying to accurately plan. It’s so much simpler just to make an Exploding Set, and try things on.

. . .

This small Pod-based technique of Zigged casting and Deconstruction is both beneath and beyond genius – like songs, stories or poems that come to people complete, this isn’t something that I or our team thought of, instead it’s something that I was finally able to see through the mist when enough clues added up.

We’ve found a number of ways to cast Rick-Racks before this, but none of them offered what the Pod does- this is how Nature does it.

If a plant wants a new leaf, for example, you don’t see it putting out a long line, and filling it in. It makes it in miniature, curled and folded up, and then unfurls it when it’s ready. To reproduce, it casts off a seed.

Everything of interest in the Universe is folded in some way. If we can see the ways how, and how the folding/unfolding happens over time, then we can learn important things about the nature of what we may truly be looking at.

People are clever, too. We don’t have to use all of a thing just to use it as a tool. If I want to run a mile, and my road is four miles long, I don’t have to use the whole road. I just run a half mile on it, and turn around. The road doesn’t care, unless maybe it loves me, and the other three and a half miles are lonely for my step (smiling). In that case, if I love the road too, I’ll train to run the WHOLE THING, or use a different piece of the road every day.

I’ve accumulated enough comments now to understand the questions that both advanced and beginning beaders have about this technique, and I’ll be creating the video to explain them (and show a bit more of the miracles) today and possibly tomorrow as well.

Keep beading, and please feel free to keep asking questions. They are so valuable to me, as I try to condense this wisdom, this information, into just a few pages. You can see how dense it can be, and there is still so much to reveal about what can be done. No one person could do this alone, from understanding it to explaining it. This project spans hundreds of thousands of minds and hands, and that’s exactly what it needed to get here.

. . .

If you understand this technique, and you’ve already taken off a Rick-Rack, why not take off another size, to build taller or smaller, or an All-Wing too (all increases, just like the little Pod)? Here is six rounds of Rainbow All-Wing on one of my 10-bead per side Casting Pods. It’s so fun to bead and hold!

Please note – All-Wings will not “fit” your hand or wrist right away, because they are sprawly, but we’ll show you a variety of ways to build on them, size and modify them to wear.

As with Rick-Rack, there is no such thing as a cast that is too small or too big. We can make gorgeous work out of every one of them. And they are quick to make, Pods and Casts, once you get the drill, so why not make another one?

You will probably want a Pod in 8 points as well, but you’ll need even fewer beads per side at that point count. If you go up to 10 or 12 points, you may find that you only have room for three or four beads per side.

For a Horned Rick-Rack (these are amazing pieces) you would need even more room, as each Horn is like a dart in your beaded fabric, a dart that cannot be ironed flat. This beauty was crafted by Maria Cristina Grifone, and was featured in CGB, Volume 1.

Karen Beningfield, who illustrates the CGB books, is keen to cast off a bangle with a form like Maria’s, above, and she’s made a PodCast Bead with 12 (and one with 14) points with which to do it. We can’t wait to see what she comes up with. Each Point Count will result in a different number of beads per side, which makes a different piece.

One neat thing I will show you in the video I’m making this week is that it’s also easy to make Casts that feature Points of different heights; this is just like the first photo in this post, really- you can use as much or little of each Side of the Pod as you like. If you want a really wild cast, bead your Pod sides rather high, and then just… sketch off what you want in the first round.

Tiena Habing built this lovely piece above off of an MRAW Band (a neat architectural start from CGB, Volumes I and II) and she had to plan for irregular, diving diversions in her Point heights. This is tricky to plan, especially in a crown-sized circle of wiggly beads.

But from a 10-Point PodCast Bead, beaded at least as long as the tallest Point here, it’s a piece a’cake. Here I am, making one with odd Points on a 10-Point Pod made by Claudia Furthner.  (Claudia has good hands, and she crafted this crowdy PodCast Bead without a center ring, which is a bit challenging to sort in the hand – and perhaps not as sturdy long-term for a Casting Model.)

Try a few odd sides, if you like, in any Point size!

If you want to make new Casting Pods in various sizes, bear in mind that it’s easiest to do them in even sizes, so that all of your Points are neatly aligned up and down, but it’s possible to do them in odd counts too, if you have the patience to keep them sorted out.

Happy beading!
Kate

Would you like to have a little class on Deconstruction, PodCast Beads, and Exploding Sets? This 45 minute session will show you all of these techniques.

Make your own PodCast Bead, and then learn how to cast a Rick-Rack Bangle off of it.
Enjoy, feel free to share, and please tag us in your social media posts so we can see your pieces, and consider them for sharing on our blog, Facebook page, or for inclusion in the CGB Volume III photo gallery.

Please leave questions in the comments here on the blog, and have fun!

By request, a quick (less than 5 minute) close-up of Snipping as a way to separate a PodCast from a bangle.

This bangle has a Rick-Rack Sizing Band (orange and yellow) of 6 Points at 10 beads per side, then an installed MRAW Band (blue with orange center beads) and then some rounds of All-Wing (all increases, alternating yellow/green and blue/green, finishing in 18 beads per side) to begin building up for a flowing, wingy exterior.

You can see my marker beads for Side Increases down near the ends of one side of the Points…. but I have a nice new way to suggest we try this.  Side Increases have never been any fun, and I want to see if we can improve that.

Hello all!

The Cycles chapters are the last to finish now in the CGB book series, and we are just now working Open Source-style with a couple of them, the Kaleidocycle and the BatCycle. As always, we’ll include some of the most striking and original work in the books. It’s how we do things globally, and it makes for a very strong project and idea base.

•  •  •
MACHINES

As it turned out, the Kaleidocycle was only the beginning of the story of Machines. We have come to find, discover or invent (those words are all so confusing) hundreds of them.

Kaleidocyle, Claudia Furthner, Austria  (24 Flat Peyote Triangles)

These forms seem intimidating, but many of them turn out to be simple. This one is just 24 little triangles.

As it turns out, so much of the enjoyment (or chaos) of Machine-making is simply about craftsmanship. Small triangles are easy to learn to make perfectly, because each one only takes 10-15 minutes to make. We can just start over if things go badly wrong.

Each element in the Machines is small enough to make with only one thread and make well. But leaving the working threads attached to the elements (as most beaders are taught to do) means a lot of thread in your way when it comes time to do the joins.

When working with clean pieces, joinery becomes a pleasure, not a chore. There are definitely times to leave thread ends exposed or to remember where they are (as in Deconstruction, for example) but not for these projects.

This is my worktable for our May beadalong – different flower patterns in the Triangle faces, each Triangle finished neatly, and then tied together in the middle by a little piece of string. I can play with them, but they stay together.

In the photo, there are a few Butterfly Assemblies (each one of these is a Mirror BatHedra unit, and three of these fold to make a BatCycle, like the photo below).

BatCycle, Joke van Biesen, the Netherlands  (Warped Hexes and Triangles)

Making components with clean edges is easy to do, and (to tempt those of you who don’t like hiding your threads) if you craft each element to stand alone we can make and take apart a lot of different Machines quite easily, without doing damage to our beadwork.

The Warped Hexes alone can make about 45 cool combinations, with and without Triangles and Warped Squares and Warped Hexagons… so consider making them neat and clean?

The first true Kaleidocycle I saw was engineered from a folding net pattern by Susannah Thomson, and it was captivating. It prompted us to track down the lineage of kinematic linkages. We saw that the folding net left two edges unjoined, and provided no hinges.

Kaleidocycle from a net, Susannah Thomson

Many beaders went on to make cycles from paper folding patterns, and they were lovely, but not all of them turned well, or lasted well from the turning. I wanted to spend some time learning the linkages before we released a pattern.

Kim Van Antwerp and Dustin Wedekind made a very nice draft pattern for the books (available for free in our Pattern Library) that focused on the Tetrahedra, and I love it – we will show a couple of different assembly methods in the books, and that will surely be one of them. But I think that more people can relate to a net layout, so that’s what we are leading with.

The Jellyfish assembly is my favorite, as it gives a nice net look and feel, but also offers the engineering strength and flexibility of a linkage. And each set of Mirror Tetrahedra is just a natural result of folding the little Jellies up.

See in the photo below how easily it folds into Mirror Tetras? There is no question if the triangles are in the right place or in the correct orientation – once you fold them up with your fingers, either the sides match up, or they don’t.

Kaleidocycle made with Jellyfish sections, except sewn into a long snake.
Contributions by Cath Thomas, Dustin Wedekind, Kim Van Antwerp, Claudia Furthner, Joke Van Biesen, Kate McKinnon.

•  •  •

Here is a dorky video I made yesterday to show the May pieces in process. I’ll be doing close up videos of all of the Machine joins, including making the beautiful Butterflies, designed by Claudia Furthner, the CGB Team, and soon you, when you make your own and send us a photo.

•  •  •

My next post will have links to many patterns for Triangles, Hypars, and Warped Hexes, along with blank coloring graphs. We are uploading them all to the Free Resources section (link on left side of this blog).

•  •  •

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Advanced beaders and/or Warped Hex Masters, would you like to play with our Butterfly Assemblies?  We would LOVE to see what you make, and we look forward to including your best Butterflies in the book (and an exhibit we’re getting ready for MIT).

Join us, and design a butterfly of your own! It can stand alone, or be part of a BatCycle.
Click the image to download a printable PDF.

•   •   •

•   •   •

Please note that Warped Hexes should only be attempted after one is proficient with Flat Peyote Triangles, Warped Squares, and Warped Pentagons. They are all the same, essentially, but each one has one more Increase to manage. To do six, you simply have to know where the beads must go, because they cannot tell you. There is no luck involved, sadly, only knowledge and determination, a gentle hand and a decent tension. Good luck!

For those of you interested in making Kaleidocycles with us in our May BeadALong, we have some nice face patterns posted in the Free Pattern Library.  The idea is to copy, modify or design one triangle, make six of them, and put them into a circle to see what they look like.  Four faces (of six triangles each) makes the turning machine.

Most triangle patterns for cycles are between 7-12 beads per side, but there are no rules about odd or even counts, or what size works best. You can make them as tiny or as huge as you want to.

We would like to see your own original designs, of course, and will publish some of them in our books, so please share your favorites!

Triangle Face Patterns for BeadALong   (click to open or download PDF)

I hope that you will laugh with happiness when you see how easy it can be!

BatCycle by Claudia Furthner

Please feel free to print out these paper folding patterns for Kaleidocycles: there is a big net join and two of our Jellyfish Net Sections.  Kaleidocycles are made from 24 triangles.
(Click on the image to download a printable two-page PDF.)

•  •  •

If you want to get started folding (and you should DEFINITELY fold a cycle in paper before you sew one in beads) print out the PDF, and cut out the beadwork along its edges. You don’t have to cut around the bead outlines, just cut straight edges. Also cut out the narrow space in the center of the Jellyfish net to the circle, to free both little legs for folding.

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After you cut out the three forms, then fold the paper along every triangle edge, backward and forward. Try to fold the lines exactly.

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This pre-creasing is an origami technique that informs the paper of where it will fold, and makes it easy (instead of frustrating) for you to fold the paper into a Machine.

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The little Jellyfish section, though, folds right up into a pair of hinged Tetrahedra. In your beadwork, you just fold them up, sew them closed into a perfectly matching set of tetras, and then attach the three sections together at the side hinges.

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It’s really simple this way. I’ll show that all in a video in just a few days. We are still making pieces and parts for you.

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Our cutouts are JUST the beaded sections, but if you download a proper folding pattern, (meant to give you tabs to tape to secure the work into a ring) you can fold a cycle you can keep, and play with.

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The Kaleidocycle is only one of many Machines and linkages like this. The paper folding pattern was devised in the 1970s by the mathematician Doris Schattschneider and the graphic artist Wallace Walker.  They patented the origami technique, and put out a gorgeous book on Escher-decorated paper Kaleidocycles.

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Our team got onto the cycling forms because an English beader you may know named Susannah Thomson had the Escher cycles book, and wanted to try doing the form in beads. She showed the CGB Team what she made (watch her first video here) and we showed the world, and then wow, everyone started making them. But most people made them from the folding nets meant for paper. The nets didn’t have any hinges to help the beadwork turn smoothly (and to help it last longer), so we engineered some that did.

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•  •  •

As I make the video on our different joins, I am spending this weekend experimenting with as many ways to sew my 24 Flat Peyote Triangles into a Kaleidocyle as I can imagine. From a flat net to individual Tetrahedra, I am making them all with the same 24 Triangles. They don’t mind. Each one of them is a finished unit.

If you are a first-time Cycler, this is the first thing I would like you to try in your own assembly. It’s really simple.

Take three of your Triangle faces (18 pieces, 6 each of three designs) and sew them into a little quilt, like this. Put Hinges (this means just add one more row of beads) between the six places marked.

One of your Hinges will be open, so that the little quilt can lie flat. Use a medium tension; no loose thread, but nothing pulled super tight. Your quilt should be able to lie flat, and also to fold up.

It doesn’t matter what beads you use to join your Triangles. Our team likes round beads for this, because they make such sturdy natural hinges, but you can use any bead that fits, and that you enjoy. Some people want to follow the pattern. If so, you may be using cylinder beads for yours.

You can sew up this little quilt with any threadpath that makes sense to you. Treat this as an exploration, and give yourself permission to make a few mistakes! Use a thread until you finish it, or come to a point where you paint yourself into a corner, it doesn’t matter. It’s OK to assemble this quilt with seven short threads or one long one. Whatever makes you comfortable.

Don’t forget the Hinges!

Play with this little quilt, and fold it into as many little packets and boxes as you can (there are quite a few) and I’ll be back with you later today to show you how to join it up.

This little layout will answer a lot of questions about the potential we have with this form.

Hello all!

I’m writing from a beautiful sunny, cool spring day in Boston. My work perch looks out over a street busy with life; there are bikes, dogs, people walking to the Boston Common, to lunch, to work, people on vacation, people who just finished a semester of college. I can hear the traffic, and the children playing next door at a preschool. Cars drive by all of the time, but slowly, because our street is the garden-way through Boston, and there are stop signs. There are tennis courts down the street in the park, and we try to play every day. It clears my head and keeps me focused.

The flowers have been astonishing. Forsythia and pink magnolias first, marching down the street in thick riots of YES, and now dogwoods, redbuds, fruit trees and tulips are making such a festival of blossoms that the sidewalks are covered in petals of all colours.  Boston is probably pink and white from the air today.

Lots of people are beading with us right now, all over the world.

In one direction, in Germany, the Perlen Poesie team just sent a magazine to press that has four or five gorgeous pages about Pierced Arrows and MRAW and our new books coming out. I’m so happy about it, and in CGB tradition it features a team. It steps out an Arrow by Ingrid Wangsvik, and shows several more by Eileen Montgomery and Kim Van Antwerp. Karen Beningfield did glittering illustrations, and Claudia Furthner and Joke van Biesen checked the German, and the word charts for each Arrow segment. I wrote a bit about casting, cloning, and defeating the peyote start, and the magazine staff wrote up a description of why and how MRAW that was so perfect I’m going to change my own writeup to match it.

In another world, the PodCast bead is being explored by bead groups everywhere, and they are casting glorious Things off of Things at such a rate that I feel that anywhere in the world right now, someone may be Snipping, Sketching or PodCasting for the first time.

On the Internets, the huge and active Seed Beads and More Facebook group is doing Machines with me, making Kaleidocycles and BatCycles, and we’ve already had some fun discoveries. One of them is that every hexagon has the ability to fold in the middle and express as a pair of linked tetrahedra. This is kind of astonishing. I mean I knew it, but I didn’t get it. I’ll be doing more pieces and more work to show this.

Really any roundish form or collection of forms should cycle, and that’s pretty neat. Claudia’s collection of butterflies on the upper right is really a rather orderly arrangement, and it turns happily.

A collection of cycles from our team: Donna Horgan, myself, and Claudia Furthner

These are the kinds of ideas we get from beading with all of you, and we are all quite thankful.

If you’d like to watch the Flower Face videos I made for the group, there are two of them, and they are right here. They are working videos, not very slick. I dream of shooting an entire series of videos (professionally filmed) while our team is in town in July. So many talented hands! In the meantime, we must make do with me. The Flower Face videos have lots of close-up sewing, which is helpful. If you’d like to get links to new videos when they post, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Thanks much to all of our new beaders! I am back to the worktable today, finalizing the Cycle and PodCast chapters, and we are getting busy drawing up some of the beautiful faces and casts that all y’all have done.

Books soon.

on my desk

it’s All Books All Of The Time as I finish up the final layouts and assembly of the full Contemporary Geometric Beadwork series (including foreign translations (yay!) and reissues of the first two volumes).

I expect to finish, print and ship our gorgeous 500 signed pre-order bundles this late September, but no official press date is set. Amazon pre-orders for regular copies will open soon.

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if you want email updates on this project.

What’s up?

We had a lot of fun with our final internet beadalong with the Facebook group Seed Beads And More, and I am happy to say that we finalized our beginning Cycle pattern to something neat we can teach anyone to do – the Flower Face Assembly.

I’ll have a finished pattern to share here with you quite soon. In the meantime, for those interested, here are some updates.

Please note particularly the workshops with Sam Norgard in Nova Scotia – Sam is working to build a new studio and teaching space in Nova Scotia, and boy do we want her doing this. I will be with her in spirit and online this July 7-9 for her Triangles In Motion workshop (I broke my leg and can’t travel, or I’d go in person in a heartbeat) and I will be there in person next summer for the next one.

Sam is a highly talented teacher and artist, a huge supporter of and contributor to the CGB project, and an instructor at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Let’s support her in this new move – let me know if you can make it up there this July, and we’ll plan a project together that we can publish in the new CGB books.

Contact Sam directly for more info.

We’re gathering in Boston in the last two weeks of July for an invited working group, but unfortunately (broken leg) I am not able to accept any further guests to our workshops who have not already made arrangements with me. I had hoped to do a few public classes and lectures, but now they will simply be online (and free). Watch the blog here for links.

My European workshop near Limoges, France (Oct 5-11) is available for signup, it’s affordable, and there are just a few sleepover spaces left at the beautiful old Domaine de Romefort in Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat, France.  Yes! You can share a room and yes we can help you find a roomie! Please contact Marca Smit via email if you would like more information.

events / commitments

August 2-10, California
UCLA Art/Sci, Victoria Vesna and Jim Gimzewski, 2 days, guest lectures, collaboration
Stanford,  guest lectures, projects with students

July 16-30, Boston
Contemporary Geometric Beadwork international work group / retreat, invited conference at MIT and my studio in Back Bay

October, 2018:  Europe
CGB Book Tour – Oct. 5-11 I’ll be in Limoges, France, for a weeklong retreat, and outside of those dates I’ll be traveling to visit art and colleagues in Linz, Barcelona, Norway and elsewhere.

June 2019, Nova Scotia
Art / mathematical beading retreat with Sam Norgard – sign up soon if you want a space in this summer’s session (I’ll be participating remotely) or the next (I will be there in person).

on the blog

While I finish all of this work, I’m taking the gentle opportunity brought by a full desk to put social media and commerce and on hiatus.

If you received this post in your email, it is because you have subscribed to the CGB blog. We will be in touch with our 500 pre-order supporters regarding current shipping addresses in October, so no need to respond to this post to inquire about order status or address changes. All replies will post as public comments on the Book Blog.

nb

Good morning from Boston.

It’s beautiful here, a cool morning that speaks of a coming season change. The birds are very busy outside the windows, and I am very busy inside mine. Happily I can see outside from every room: MIT from the kitchen, the Hancock and the Prudential buildings from my writing desk.

I love it here on the East Coast.

I love my possibilities, our new work, our final decisions about our new books. It’s so exciting that although we are finishing one phase of the project, so many new ideas have opened in our minds, our hands. It is an endless exploration of humans, making shapes with beads and fiber.

I’ve been looking back through my photographs from the past ten years of CGB.

Remember this poster? I still have about a hundred of them, and I’ll put them in the Shop when we re-open it soon.

Apologies that it’s been so long since I have written an update here. You may know that I was hit by a car while walking in May.

It was pretty bad – I was crossing a street and the car was going fast. The accident fractured my left knee and sent me flying. I landed on my head, and it was intense, but so am I. Twelve weeks later, here I am and I’m going to be OK. I had to learn to walk again, which was good for my character. But now I can run.

In early July, when I could make it down the stairs and to the end of the block again, I started calling Ubers to drive me to the tennis courts. I channeled my inner Bruce Lee (which is luckily only a few microns down) and I played leaning hard on one crutch. I never fell down or got hurt, so in retrospect it was a fabulous decision. I became legendary on the MIT courts for sheer cussedness, and a few other people maybe worked harder themselves when they realized how much of their potential they weren’t using.

I haven’t posted anything much online since it happened; the impact was big enough that it actually knocked me right out of myself. I regret not being able to really share much about the CGB team retreat we had here in Boston in July; about 10 of us got together from all corners of the world to take a hard review of our innovations, our decisions, our techniques, and see if there was any way we could still become… simpler.

It was an incredible meeting of the minds, and in fact we found several new good things, and just in time. It was expanding, destroying, beautiful, and was just right for me. I was so grateful to see them all, to be immersed in discovery again.

I couldn’t bead, read or write while I was injured, and this was a great sorrow to me. I didn’t know why I couldn’t do anything (probably because of the whack to my head) but I could definitely think and process.

I will be back with you soon, and thank you all for the many thoughts, acts, and words of kindness that came through while I was recovering. Just a bit more patience, and I’ll show you something amazing.

kate

Greetings, beaders and friends.

I am happy to say that our three new books are almost done, with amazing revisions to some of our first ideas (wait until you see where we ended up with some of our questions and projects) and it won’t be long now before they will tumble out in paper form. It’s an exciting time of transition, and we thank you all for coming so far with us on the journey. What a time this project has treated us to.

I wish I could be in the room with all y’all when you see the crazed things we found and try them for yourselves. It amazes me that there is still so much to see, so many fundamentals still to explore in this glittering medium.

Kaleidocycle, Ursula Raymann, Switzerland

I’ll open the shop again soon, and we will have some outrageous beadwork from the team for sale as well as the new books and reissues of the first two volumes. We will be sending our old books out in future with a little booklet, showing all of the new starts and how to do Deconstruction (snipping).

As usual, though, you don’t have to wait for us to publish to begin trying the new techniques. We will begin sharing them all immediately, here on the blog – one of the first up will be the fabulous Cat Burglar Of Edges – one of three all new ways we’ve found to build straight, irregular or slanted Rick-Rack Bangles exactly to size, every time.

Like this magnificent piece from Ingrid Wangsvik:

Slanted Three-Layer Rick-Rack Bangle
Ingrid Wangsvik, Norway

Cat Burglars can either throw out loops to get to the next levels, or they can pirate an existing edge. Ingrid did this one with Helix Loops, a technique from Christina Vandervlist from the first CGB book. As Joy Davison pointed out when we were all working together in Boston, once you add a loop to a piece, you can place a row of increases at any point in the loop. Why not off-center?

As it turns out, though, the simplest possible Rick-Rack Casting Model is just 5 or more loose triangles, which I am sure you have kicking around in your beadbox right now. I’ll show you how on the blog next week. I just put my head down on the table when we realized. After all this time…

At least the mighty PodCast Bead is still the Carpenter’s Rule of the Universe. Rick-Rack is only one of the many things it can spit out.

Our team is moving forward also with Hyperbolic Geometry, which is a beautiful place to be. When we gathered in Boston this summer, Joy (Jay Dee on social media) shared with us some of her favorite increase counts for growing warpy circles and polygons.

The ideas started bouncing around the worktable between Claudia Furthner, Joy, Karen Beningfield (our lead illustrator) Ingrid Wangsvik, LeAnn Baehmann, Sarah Toussaint Franklin Martin and myself, and everyone was off and running, making linkages, pods, and fabrics.

We have so much to show you.

thrilling Hyperbolic Pentagon Pods, inspired by a vase of nasturtium flowers
Karen Beningfield, Capetown, South Africa

We’ve begun to realize that hyperbolic forms (like Warped Squares and Warped Pentagons) can easily grow on or partner with more standard straight-line geometry; this is leading to deeper thoughts about how to do insertions, and also make morphing, aware fabrics and skins.

Straight-line and Hyperbolic Geometric bangles
Pat Verrier, England and Claudia Furthner, Linz, Austria

Although I would also badly like to dive into the Hyperbolic World, I remain with the Pattern Book, managing the finish.

As you know if you follow this blog, or our YouTube channel, back in May, another thing we learned this year is that six peyote triangles can come together to form a hexagon (or a butterfly) and fold over to form a working set of Mirror Tetrahedra.

The fourth faces of the tetras are almost never necessary to make Machines, but with the simple addition of an extra row of join beads at the center hinge, receptors are always available for a fourth set of triangles to easily Zip in or be decreased in place.

A 6-Triangle Butterfly Assembly folded into a set of 3-Sided Mirror Tetrahedra
ready for assembly into a Kaleidocycle
Kate McKinnon, Boston

Thinking of the fourth face of the tetras as optional changed the way we decided to teach Machines like Kaleidocycles, because there is no reason to make people deal with 24 triangles and shared joins when they can make 18 triangles and have dedicated single joins instead.

Our team met again in October, in France, and I had a chance to run our new thoughts through another set of expert team beaders, including Susannah Thomson, Pat Verrier, Marca Smit, Nathalie DeLesse, Monica Doser, Ursula Raymann, Ina Hascher, Brenda Day and Vee Pretorius.

More shocking ideas were had, more pieces begun, and a deeper understanding of the Fibonacci sequence was begun for me after an innocent exploration was started by some of the above…

Please stay tuned to the Bead Blog here if you would like to participate in our upcoming BeadAlongs to demonstrate the new techniques. And thank you for your continued patience as I wrangle thousands of images and hundreds of pages of text into the simplest, most beautiful set of books we could dream up.

Excitingly, we will be at MIT again for the January term, and this time, look for Nico Williams to join us as a new team member. There will be a couple of public lectures, and a few private classes available with our team.  HUGS, Kate

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