Books coming soon! For publication updates, please bookmark the Publication Updates page. If you are receiving this post in your email, it is because you have subscribed to the CGB Book Blog. This is where all new pattern releases and videos will post, so stick around!

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This has been a very visual couple of weeks at CGB HQ. I’ve been finishing a job that only I can do, which is to complete the library of images of all of the pieces I’ve photographed for CGB and get the color separations in order for the press. I have nine external hard drives with backups and over 10,000 images and videos. There have been four MacBooks and eight digital cameras used since the start of the project. Making sure we have all of the final cuts in one neat place is a monumentous *  and beautiful task.

Kaleidocycle, Claudia Furthner, Austria

In this post are a couple of photos you haven’t seen yet from the new books. Below is a shot of one of our new Messenger Cycles. The idea is to take advantage of the special spaces inside the tetrahedra to place messages, prayers, photographs or memorabilia inside the spaces before closing them up.

Each of the three spaces behind the red-tipped triangles has a rolled-up, handwritten prayer for peace behind it. As the cycle turns (like temple origami or Tibetan prayer wheels or prayer flags in the wind) the intentions of the maker will move outward through the hands of the persons turning, and will flow to all peoples, to the Universe.

Messenger Cycle, Kate McKinnon, Boston, USA

It’s a nice idea, and who doesn’t want to send our good thoughts, hopes, dreams and prayers wider and higher, further upward and outward? Our dreams are what make us human, and striving for them is what can allow us to have a real impact.

This pretty blue Morpho cycle is one of our 18-Triangle Butterfly Assemblies, and we made it specially for the UK Beadworkers Guild in honour of Susannah Thomson’s contributions to our project. It will be in their January issue, and when their issue comes out, we’ll definitely post the pattern for free here on our web site.

Susannah herself will be here with us in January at MIT, as will a few other surprise guests like Victoria Vesna, Ana MacArthur and Nico Williams. I’ll feature them individually in the next few weeks here on the blog.

The next photo is one of my favorites. It was assembled in Photoshop, and it calls out the essential geometry of our beadwork with colour.

Warped Square by Kim Van Antwerp, USA
Completely, Utterly Flat Peyote Triangle by Brenda Day, Wales  ***

In this shot, you can see clearly the specific coat-hanger shape of the geometry that comes from placing herringbone increases in every round of peyote stitch. The two stitches create triangular cells of fill, and no matter what size the pieces are (or how many increases you place in the center) the geometry of the triangle-cells in between the increase lines is the same.

The only reason that they look slightly different in the photo is because the Square is Warped, and the Triangle is lying flat on the table.

Below are two Kaleidocycles from the May 2018 BeadALong at the Facebook group Seed Beads & More. Each one has a story, and each one was made with love, difficulty, kindness, and a care for trying to express an idea as elegantly and correctly as possible.

CGB will be collecting lots of the photos of cycles made in this exploration – what won’t fit in the books will go on the posters and be shown in the online galleries.

above, Cathy J. Wells
below, Karen Westcott

The images I’m finalizing now are for the first of our new books to go to press, the CGB Pattern Book.

We are still collecting some Cycle images for CGB Volume III, so if you are in one of the other large groups that made Kaleidocycles, BatCycles, and Power Puffs (yes, they turn out to be Machines as well) then don’t worry, we want to include you all.

A BatCycle by Joke Van Biesen, The Netherlands

The CGB Shop will re-open in a matter of days, and we’ll start taking new and wholesale book and poster orders at that time. The first two books are being reprinted with a new enclosure showing the new techniques, and will be back in stock in January. Things are moving pretty fast now, despite it being the holidays.

Don’t worry if you’ve moved since you ordered. It’s actually pretty easy to keep up with US address changes these days with the new postal software. There will only be a few of you (mostly out of US) we need to email to discuss delivery.

*  Monumentus is a little-used word that describes how big, wide, tall and important a thing (in our case the gorgeous tangle of questions) can turn out to be. A truly monumental pile of questions, answers, photos and actual beadwork is condensing into a thrillingly momentous** moment.  As it turned out, though, somewhere around 2006 other people began using it.

**  Momentous is a word that was dreamed up in the 1650s. It was a time when people must have needed a nice word for not just moments, but special moments. That there are, sometimes events or discoveries with so much momentum that they can change the future.

*** The ONLY way to get a peyote Triangle to lie flat on the table is to make it with almost no tension, just enough to create a smooth fabric. If you use even modest tension, even our simple Triangles are hyperbolic. And hyperbolic = BATTERY.

Hello to you lovely, energetic and questing beading friends, colleagues and observers.

I am happy to invite you to visit our last CGB work session before we go to press: the MIT IAP Open Studio classroom we are hosting on campus January 7 – Feb 1. You can come in person or join our live streams online.

January 7, 2019:  Opening Lecture, EXHIBIT, and workshop signups
Art, Architecture and and Models of Hyperbolic Energy
Stata Center, Lecture Hall 34-101
11 AM – NOON

We’ll post live links here when the session is up on the MIT web site next week.

After the MIT session closes on Feb 2, we’ll send the new books to the press  and the CGB project will officially be ended. Of course the work will continue… more on this soon.

I welcome you all enthusiastically as we test our new shortcuts, threadpaths, and hyperbolic forms. This is also the very last chance to create pieces for publication, or to send work for our ending runway show on MIT campus on Friday, February 1, 2019.

If you come on January 7 you can hear our opening lecture in person and see a beautiful exhibit of work from our team. Our opening day will be on the ground floor of the Stata Center, the Frank Gehry confection at the heart of campus. There will be time before and after the lecture to talk to me or stay and work with us, and on that day we will begin signups for our Open Studio slots as well – there are days available for you to come most Tuesdays-Fridays in January.

A folded Energetic Form by Kate

If you join us during IAP Open Studio, it’s a bit like sitting in the exit row of the airplane, because you will be present as a part of our team, and this means that we will rely on you to help us test our new patterns and to welcome and teach basics to the MIT people who come through our door. It really helps new beaders to sit next to someone who can help them make their first triangle, Warped Square, or Hyperdisk.

The reason that MIT created the IAP term is so that their students, faculty and staff have a chance to stretch their minds, learn a hobby, or pursue independent ideas, and it’s a chance to bring unusual people outside of academia to campus to teach. We cherish our nerdy beaders, and this is a wonderful chance to attract and encourage new minds to join us. Big thanks to MIT for having us back.

The wrap-up lecture will be on the first Friday in February, and it will be in the same room as the opening lecture. After lecture, we will have activities on campus that day as the weather permits.

Things are crazy here right now as we careen to the end of this beautiful time. Thank you all for your wonder and patience and oh, oh, just wait. I’m so excited to show you the end result of all of this work, from all of these hands and minds.

Please email me at kate@katemckinnon.com if you are local to the Boston-Cambridge area and you want to participate in these activities as a part of the team in the timeframe Jan 7 – Feb 1.

Ingrid Wangsvik, Claudia Furthner, Joke van Biesen and Kate McKinnon outside the Stata Center at MIT in 2018

Greetings, all!

This post will look wonky if you are reading it on your phone, or in your email. Click on the link to the post to see it display properly on all devices. I rushed this one together a bit to get you all beading on some of our newest ideas about Hyperbolic Loops, Links and Cycles.

Link to this post on the Book Blog:
https://beadmobile.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/making-a-hyperloop-or-a-hypercycle/

Click photo for large version.
Anemone HyperCycle, Karen Beningfield
created from four HyperLoop units, each having a finish of two flowers at the caps

For our first bead-along of 2019, I’d like to show you how to make a hyperbolic ring of beads (A HyperLoop) and then either stabilize it as a double chain link or make it into part of a HyperCycle, a design dreamed up by Claudia Furthner and interpreted by Karen Beningfield. (Huge props to Joy Davison, who spent months making hyperbolic rings and disks, counting beads, and making judgment calls about where and how many  increases to place for the best hyperbolic fun.)

Look for other applications of this stepped herringbone technique in CGB Volume 1, pages 84-85, where Christina Vandervlist showed us how to use Stepped Decreases to make a Pyramid on top of a Flat Square. (You can make a neat Tetrahedra in this style by starting with a Flat Triangle, too.)

See Stepped Increases also in CGB, Volume II, pages 30-31, where Rebecca Bisgyer used them to control the angle of the skirt on her corset-like bracelet. You can see them here alternating in a one-two pattern, in a dusky blue grey, along the creases of the skirt (click photos to enlarge):

If you have never done stepped increases or decreases, I suggest using a very clear colourway for your first try, so you don’t get confused.

As soon as you understand the shape and nature of the HyperLoop, it will be easy to do in single colours, or subtle shades.

Here is another example of one of Karen’s anemone flower HyperCycles. In this piece, she used gold for the HyperLoops, and called out the increases in black. GLORIOUS, but still confusing for beginners.

So rather than start with a cycle, I’d like to show the HyperLoop to you first alone, so you have an excuse to use separate colours. Let’s make something that looks like the loop below. This  HyperLoop has been stabilized with a few extra rounds in the center to make it fun and easy to study.

A 48 bead-center HyperLoop by Kate McKinnon

This little HyperLoop is an easy piece to make. It’s only 7-10 rounds of beadwork (depending on whether or not you reinforce the center) and it’s a simple start. Find a few grams of size 11 Delicas in at least three different colours (I used blue, green, gold and varoius reds), and a tiny spoonful of size 15 rounds (I used bright red). You can make this entire form in round beads too.

First, make a ring of 32 or 48 size 11 beads, alternating red and blue. You can either do a peyote start (this is 64 or 96 beads in a circle, depending on the size you chose) or of course you can cast these Loops off of a Spine or an edge, if you have learned how to do that.

My example above was a 48 bead center ring, but for my step by step example below, I will show the smaller 32 bead start, which is what Karen used to make her Anemone Hypercycle, and Claudia used to make her Space Station, which we will also step out in the book. The process for each Loop is the same, one just has a larger start.

Use soft tension as you bead this loop – HyperThings get spiky and hard to handle if done tightly. Try the 48 bead center first (a 96 bead peyote start) if you are a tight beader.

Please note that this short tutorial is not meant for beginners; you need some working knowledge of peyote stitch and herringbone increases to do the Loop. Don’t mind the photo quality – these are just placeholder shots for me.

Round 1 and 2, peyote start:  String 64 or 96 beads (whichever size you are doing) in a ring. Weave through a dozen beads or so to stabilize the thread, and exit at a blue bead. Keep a bit of a tail to weave in later.

Round 3:  single bead peyote, alternating blue and gold
Round 4:  single bead peyote, all blue
Round 5:  single blue beads alternating with two-drop placements of gold beads

Round 6:  single blue peyote alternating with single gold beads placed in between increase beads. Putting in these single beads is the difficult part with peyote starts; try flexing the ring if you have trouble, and they should snap mostly into place.

Round 7:  single bead peyote, all green. This round will be very ruffly.

Round 8:  single green beads alternate with 2-drop gold increases. This finishes the outer edge of the basic HyperLoop. Reinforce the edge with another pass of thread, and move your needle down to the center ring.

Rounds 9 and 10:  ZERO, ONE or TWO passes of small size 15 round beads will stabilize the center – use two if your tension is very loose, one if it’s medium, none if it’s tight. Weave in your thread, and play with the HyperLoop. It can be a double potato chip, or a wavy ring.

After you complete one size, a 32 or 48 bead center, consider making the other size as well so you can feel the difference. Next post will show you how these HyperLoops make HyperCycles and amazing infinity loop chain links.

Feel free to add additional rounds to your HyperLoop, because yes, that is a great Exploding Set too, and we will show it in the book that way. You can build big and explode the thing into many rings….

(Please note that these are new projects; we discovered them in the past few months and wanted to include them in the books. So we are still doing the final illos, and taking the Real Photos. Excuse the quick photos and instructions for this post, but I wanted to get you all started playing with us – HyperLoops are our Everything!)

We are so pleased to be invited back to MIT for the January term to show our work.
We welcome you to join us and help show MIT students and faculty how we make Hypars and Hypers, and basic peyote-stitched forms, and to help test the patterns and pages from our new books, heading to press after these sessions.

Here is our schedule. Please note that Open Studio times are the last two weeks of the month, and our lecture room is now 34-101, right on Vassar Street.

You can park in the Stata Center garage, if you drive. If you come in for the first lecture and want to stay for a few days to work with us, we welcome you. Most of our team coming in are arriving around January 14th.

Please stop in if you are in the Boston area! Our goal is to engage ever more curious people in the arts, sciences and engineering to take a deeper look at what simple models can teach about geometry, the Universe and the architecture of the world around us.

In the last two weeks of the month we will also be staging live exhibits, taking tables in Stata and the Infinite Corridor to teach folding, and walking runway shows of our work around campus.

The last lecture on Feb 1 will be a bit of a party, and we have the room all day.

Feel free to forward, post, or print our poster!

PDF versions: cgb at mit iap 2019 poster

We will not be able to live stream our talk today, but it will be on YouTube later this evening.

We had a nice time yesterday at MIT, thank you to all of you who came to campus on such a cold day. Big thanks to Erik and Martin Demaine and to MIT for having us back.

Our video will take a few hours of fiddling before it appears on YouTube.  Cameras, computers, internets… it’s really a miracle that they all work at all. It’s astonishing what humans have jigged up in a small amount of time. Spaceflight, climate crises. Crazed beadwork!

For our Feb 1 closing lecture (which will be a big event) we’ll do Go Live sessions on Facebook and YouTube, in addition to having it professionally filmed by MIT AV, hopefully for inclusion in their archive.

Franklin Martin Jr.

Yesterday’s presentation is summarized entirely in these slides, so please enjoy the talk as a PDF for now, and we’ll get the Live Action version up as soon as we can today. You can page through the PDF just like a 67-page book.

It was nice to review the entire span of the work. The slideshow features pieces from the history of the project, some of which I hadn’t thought about in a long time. In addition to the pieces I show in the slides, with me in person and on exhibit I had work from Sarah Toussaint, Ingrid Wangsvik, Lia Melia, Deb Schwartz, Daria Tittenberger, Joy Davison (Jay Dee), Joke van Biesen, Susannah Thomson, Pat Verrier, Karen Westcott, and many other members of our team and extended community.

mit iap 2019 slideshow

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Beaders: come to our Open Studio and help turn MIT kids onto the marvels of beadwork!

JANUARY 15-31 .  MIT 36-372   

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MIT Activities

Open Studio:   Tuesday-Friday, Jan 15-31, 10-5 each day.   Building 26, Room 322
Final Lecture:   Friday, February 1, Building 34, ground floor auditorium 34-101

(both lectures will be uploaded to YouTube; we had a technical hitch with the Jan 7 video file, but it should be sorted soon.)

Mo Fisher

The Project Explorations

I’ve been thinking with deep respect of how many of us there are now beading together and freely sharing ideas.

We’re in the hundreds of thousands now, and spread all around the world. The forms we are making are all brand new to beadwork, and this is not nothing, as humans have been doing beads for over 300,000 years.

Kat Oliva

In that context, the geometric ideas seem very meaningful. We are touching deep chords, and the information seems to be in front of us, insisting on expressing in our minds and hands. It will not leave us until we understand it at the most fundamental levels: waves, frequencies and potential.

I feel lucky to be part of the unfolding, as the ideas of a geometrically driven universe are flowering in all fields. On the beadwork team, our materials are so perfect for making these structures. Many of our forms are not only like the Universe, they are suitable models.

Joke van Biesen

It’s been a busy time here in Boston, as I am part of two teams at the IAP term – the beading and origami team (CGB) and a science team (Advanced Propulsion). The teams will overlap like helixes or HyperDiscs for the rest of the month.

The science team had two lectures this week, and each of them were amazing. There are 35 topics on the list, all of them outrageous, and each time we sit down together there will be new people in the room, new ideas flowing.

Lorenz Butterfly

As with most of our gatherings, we start slowly and spin up. This week, Susannah Thomson is in town from Bristol, England, and she will be here also to overlap with the first week of the activities at MIT. Next week, the extended CGB team begins arriving from all over, and by the end of the month we will be a huge crowd, filling the final auditorium.

People arrange themselves in these gatherings, we find. They come in and out at seemingly random times, but never fail to make a coherent whole. Susannah is often an impetus for new thought or an instigator of Actions, so it’s no surprise to me to find that she is here early in the process, as she was with her Kaleidocycle.

Susannah Thomson

One of our projects at MIT is to bead HyperDiscs that look like Lorenz manifolds. These are nice images from Paul Bourke, but a Google search will give you many additional possible colour combinations.

We can create this form quite easily in beads, by making a HyperDisc (which is just adding rounds to a HyperLoop). To make a Lorenz-model colourway, like those above, just use a different colour for every round or few rounds. Fill in the center later if you like either by beading inward, or dropping in two pre-made circles to fix your Loop into a twist like those above.

If you want yours to look like the mathematical models, also perhaps leave a line of white, black, or clear between each colour so it looks like a background. (We are just starting to bead our own Lorenz models, and we’ll show you pix when we have a few.)

This form by Claudia is a nice example of a Disc form, but with only 12 increase lines, it doesn’t really have enough space to twist to be open enough to form two discs. Try using 16 increases instead, like we taught in this post.

HyperDisc with 12 Increase Lines, Claudia Furthner

We start our Loops from either a Spine, a peyote start, a casting ring or a tiny little Podcast bead. When making discs like this in our beads, it can be easiest to start with an open centered Loop, work outward in a hyperbolic way, and then decide whether or not to bead inward to fill the center.

The HyperDiscs have so many applications and fun forms that you may want to study yours for a while before Geometrically Capturing it into some kind of fixed state.

Here are some images of different 16-increase HyperLoops. 

HyperLoops with 16 Increase Lines, Kate McKinnon

The yellow HyperLoop has Geometrically Captured a pentagon; this is how we are making units for bangles like the one below by Karen Beningfield.

If I dropped a pre-made Flower element into the blue Capture beads,
I would be half of the way to a double-flower like Karen’s.

The bangle above is made from six double-flower elements, each one started with a HyperLoop in gold and black.

Pentagons were Captured on each edge, and pre-made pentagonal flowers were Zipped in. The flowers were made using a five-bead start (five beads in a circle) and the same stepped increase pattern (Increase, Point Round, Fill Round, Increase….) that the HyperLoops grow from.

See this post for instructions on starting a HyperLoop.

We will be teaching this form next week at MIT, and shooting step-by-step video that we will post here on the site. So if you need more instruction to get started, just hang tight until next week.

Here is a HyperDisc that I am going to grow as large as possible on a tiny PodCast Bead. It is a very distinctive presentation, with the Stepped Increases curling forward.

A HyperDisc growing ever-larger on a 16-Point PodCast Bead (8 points up and 8 down).
The stepped pattern of the Increases is very clear here.

Good morning from Boston, possibly before a snowstorm.
We have a small core team here working on the final HyperLoops and Casting Spines for the book, and local beaders, MIT students, guests, and faculty who drop in and out as they wish. We are folding origami in paper and doing beading.

CGB IS MEETING IN ROOM 322 OF BUILDING 26
26-322
TUESDAY-FRIDAY 10-5

FRIDAY, February 1    •    11 am – Noon
MIT Building 34, Room 101

50 Vassar St. Cambridge (next to Frank Gehry’s Stata Center)
Parking is very difficult, but the #1 bus and the Red Line both go to MIT

All are welcome

Thanks much to filmmaker Bed Ged Low for filming a bit of video on some of our current work.  The show is 11 minutes long, and we will show it this Friday at our final lecture and also put it up on YouTube.

The Fibonacci sequence shown in this shot was beaded by Ursula Raymann, and it came from ideas that we had when the team was together last in France. I have a team piece like this to finish and show as well, with 5 hands and a dozen people’s ideas included.

See you at the lecture (our classroom is only open to the MIT community this week) or see the lecture on YouTube the following week.
Kate

Thanks to Ben Ged Low, in town visiting the science team with the Safire group – we appreciate your time filming our pieces!

This is just a preview of some of the work and film we will be showing tomorrow at MIT – it’s our wrap-up lecture from a busy and rewarding IAP session. Big thanks to Erik Demaine and to MIT for hosting us.

Come find us, 11-12, MIT Buildng 34, room 101 (ground floor auditorium)

Good morning! I plan to attempt to stream the lecture part of our visuals today live on our Facebook page and make a deeper video in the next few weeks that will include much more. Follow along today if you like (and if it works) but please don’t feel that you are missing anything if you don’t see the talk live.

Our presentation will only become richer  in the next few weeks when it’s mixed with all of the images, video and amazement that came out of the last month of work at MIT.

One of the truly beautiful things about this project is that our connections are time-independent; in fact the more people who see an idea at different times, the happier it is in propagating, I think. And we have a lot of discovery to share. These visuals are mostly history, recent and ancient.

In the final cut of this talk, I’ll also include film of Joke van Biesen showing some of her larger pieces. Most of the work shown in these images is on display today at MIT – Building 34, Room 101, the large ground floor auditorium.

Tell your phone GPS “MIT Building 34” and enter on the Vassar Street side. It looks like this. Parking is tough around campus. I greatly prefer to park somewhere easy and Uber, train or bus to MIT.

beady hugs!
Kate

Click here to view the PDF of some of the images I will discuss:

MIT IAP 2019 slideshow FEB 1      (this is a large file; lots of images)

And here is the video I will be discussing, shot by Ben Ged Low in our classroom last week:

Hello from the HyperLooping chapter of the upcoming CGB Pattern Book. This is our last chapter, and I hope you can see why we could not leave these beauties behind; they were the Missing Link that helps put the Exploding Sets, the PodCast Bead and the Casting Spine into perspective.

In fact, the HyperDisc is the third Exploding Set, as it turns out, and how badly we needed it. Just like Casting Spines; we didn’t know until we did, and then it was important. If you haven’t seen these yet, hang tight. We have some real surprises for you, including magnificent Hyper-pieces from Karen Beningfield, Claudia Furthner, Ingrid Wangsvik, and the community who beaded with us in January in Boston.

Above, a hyperbolic bangle by Joke van Biesen, the Netherlands, made during MIT IAP 2019

I did succeed in recording the final lecture at MIT (and it was live-streamed on our Facebook page) and it will be up on this site and on our YouTube Channel when we get a bit more added to it – Joke van Biesen’s incredible morphing surfaces and a few more pieces and ideas that we didn’t have time for in the lecture. So far we’ve had tens of thousands of people tune into it via the live feed, and it will be fun to see it travel again next week when the final version is put up.

For now, please enjoy a few photos that traveled through my camera and hands in the last days, headed for the books.

Above, a hyperbolic manifold by Joke van Biesen, the Netherlands
Below, the hexagonal center of a larger piece in progress by Nico Williams. Quebec

Above, a PodCast bead by Nico Williams. Quebec, made during IAP 2019
Below, an irregular Rick-Rack Bangle growing off of a PodCast Bead via Helix Loops by Joy Davison

MORE SOON!

Hello all! We are just finishing the HyperLoops and HyperLines chapter here at CGB Central, and should have news on the books soon- stay tuned. HyperThings are the last to be integrated into the concepts and patterns. Thanks to our pre-order folks for their support of this beautiful project. 

What’s on the table today?

We’ve been talking on team and on social media about our increases and decreases, and how we notate them, how we think about them, and whether or not the original names for corner increases apply to those placed in curves, lines, or asymmetrically. Is Triangle Increase the best term to describe a herringbone stack?

Maybe not, but quite a few people know the name, and I can certainly see many places in pieces like this where the geometry of the peyote triangle is expressing. 

Above, you can see the soaring increase lines of the classical Triangle Increase building an 8-Point PodCast Bead (multicoloured and black) and an asymmetric Rick-Rack Bangle (the red and white section, soon to be removed). Podcast bead by Ingrid Wangsvik, Rick-Rack by Kate. Below are a few more pieces using this same technique.

two-bead Herringbone or Triangle Increases placed into MRAW Bands
Left, beadwork by Kate McKinnon, right by Sarah Loudon

In the upcoming new CGB books, we use two main increase progression patterns to build our peyote-stitched pieces. The Triangle Increase, shown above,is a herringbone stack, with two beads added at a time in each round.  The second pattern we use a lot is a three-round progression, a 2/1 stepped increase often called the Hexagon Increase.

You can in fact see the soul of the flat hexagon in this gorgeous spiral built using the Hexagon Increase. So I think the names are just fine.

Design and beadwork Claudia Furthner, Austria

Below is a little sample of my own that shows how the 2/1 Hexagon Increase progressions look over the first five rounds. The tail is just a Casting Spine, and the blue and gold beads are the result of the increase progression. You can see the spiral building and the clean geometry taking over the line.

Casting Spines are really neat, and they are one of the recent finds we had during team review sessions, and all of us said “we must add this to the book”.

Joy Davison (Jay Dee on social media) created our first one when decided to add a Stitch-In-The-Ditch round to three rounds of flat peyote stitch. It formed a remarkable rope, with a central core and three spiny lines of beads around it. We will have a few pretty patterns for them in the book.

Here is one made by Nico Williams, using black beads for the core (the middle of the three flat rows) and Picasso Delica beads for the other two flat rounds and also the Stitch-In-The-Ditch round. It looks like a real spine.

If we aren’t starting off of Casting Spines, we like to do a PodCast build or a peyote start. Each gives a different feel of HyperLine or HyperLoop.

above: two Hyperloops beaded by Kate McKinnon – at left, growing on a tiny PodCast, at right, from a peyote start. Both have their advantages.

HyperLoop design Joy Davison & Claudia Furthner

You can see the 2/1 pattern of the Hexagon Increase clearly in these two HyperLoops; the one at left growing on a PodCast Bead, and the one at right grown from a peyote start.

We make things like this fabulous, entirely wearable bangle out of HyperLoops, and as you can see any notion of hexagons in this piece has given way to the Geometric Capture of pentagons instead. The 2/1 increase easily accommodates many shapes.

Anemone Bangle by Karen Beningfield.
You can choose to Capture ellipses, triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, or any other shape that you have room for in your HyperLoops.

Increases can be alternated, spiralled, switched, and placed off-center. Below is an asymmetric Rick-Rack Bangle from Ingrid Wangsvik, Norway, with herringbone increases going three different ways in three different layers. They stack like ocean waves.

Above, Ingrid Wangsvik, Asymmetrical Rick-Rack Bangle

We can now show you how to do this off of a line of triangles, or loops thrown off of the tips of a PodCast Bead, much like Christina Vandervlist did to make the Helix Bangle from CGB Volume I.

Here are two such Helix-Loop starts in progress. 

above, PodCast- based Helix-Loop starts to asymmetrical Rick Rack
Joy Davison and Franklin Martin, Jr.

Below, a Warped Hexagon made using a Triangle Increase, Nico Williams, Quebec

We’ve had a huge amount of innovation in the past year, and that’s a fact. Every time we sit down to review our conclusions, we have new earthshaking discoveries. The only solution for me to finish these books was to declare victory, go into hiding, and try to bang this all out before one of us has another golden idea that cannot be ignored. See you soon!

Good morning beaders, won’t you join us on a global BeadALong from the upcoming CGB Pattern Book?

It’s an Exploding PodCast Set!

The first step is to make a 24-Point PodCast Bead. This is a tiny beaded bead, a small marvel that sits on a dime but sports a casting edge of 120 beads. It can build a Rick-Rack or All Wing bangle with 12 points up and 12 down, and it can cast off straight lines, wavy lines, components, and even a long Casting Spine.

This will grow up to be a simple but powerful Exploding Set, and it  will show three of the techniques that revolutionized our world. Each of the three steps are quite simple.

We are workshopping the whole Exploding Set today at Bead Soup in Maryland, and Julia Pretl, Kat Oliva and Kristen Ho are here with us, Diane Fitzgerald is with us in spirit. They, I, and a couple of dozen experienced beaders will be talking today about the words we use, the notation we clarify with, and how we plan to all move forward together. Already, progress is fantastic.

Here are links to two pages – one explains the PodCast Bead, and the other is specifically to step out the 24-Point version we are using for our BeadALong. Choose the two-page Spread if you are viewing it on your computer, and the two separate Pages if you want to print.

Bead Soup PDF Spread

Bead Soup PDF Pages

Hugs to all, and I’ll post the second step tomorrow – the Wave.

(Then we make the Casting Spine, and then we do partial Deconstruction, and then a bit of Stitch In The Ditch on the Spine before it comes off of the Wave, and then a whole lot of new things you can do with this.)

Greetings, beaders!

Just a note- if you are getting this in your email, please remember that it is a public forum. Any reply that you make will post as a public blog comment, so please keep comments to the project at hand. Books are coming soon – and this BeadALong is in fact the front end of the new ideas, and represents the reason we changed all of our starts. So if you are eager for the books, BEAD THIS WITH US. This is the first project, and you will be amazed by it.

To contact us to submit photographs or say hello, email kate@katemckinnon.com.

THE EXPLODING PODCAST SET: STEP 2, The Wave

This Exploding Set might not look like a big deal, I know. But I think it will surprise you. After this little starter is built up to the beaded bead you see on the left, we’ll Deconstruct it, and off of the edge will come a six-round Hexagon Wave, which we will make into something, and a beautiful, supple Casting Spine, a tool you will use again and again to start work.

STEP 1, yesterday, created the starter PodCast Bead, with 24 peaks (12 up and 12 down) and STEP 2, today, will make the Hexagon Wave.

In the photo above, the Wave is sitting quietly as a stack of hexagons. But if you unfold it into a single ring, you can arrange it into a variety of connected geometric or molecular shapes. Lookie. This is just a couple of the many arrangements possible for the Wave, once it’s off of the PodCast. These could be finished as bracelets or they might become geometric links in a spectacular chain.

Catch up with Step 1 here:
PodCast Bead PDF Pages
PodCast Bead PDF two-page Spread

The PodCast Bead is simple to make. It’s just peyote stitch with two-bead Split Increases (also known as Herringbone or Triangle increases) and this is very much like making a flat peyote triangle or a Warped Square,  24 increases are so dense and lively, though, that they have no hope of laying flat – all they can do is make a little spiky tube.

click any image to enlarge

Be sure to use two alternating colours for your PodCast increases, so that you can easily see how to sort the legs of the PodCast up and down once it starts to get wiggly. I kept the blue up and the yellow down while I built this one. Finish your PodCast with hot red tips at the increases, to make it easy to Deconstruct the set, weave in your working threads and trim.

STEP TWO, The Wave:  SIX ROUNDS OF HEXAGON INCREASE

Summary:  Add a stop bead to a fresh thread and begin beading immediately without weaving in. Add six rounds of Hexagon Increase. Weave in your working thread to finish the section, but leave your starting tail so you know where it is.

Above, Step 2, completed

The Hexagon Increase is a 3-round Increase Cycle, starting with any one of these three rounds:

1 Increase:  An Increase Round comes after a Fill Round, and before a Point Round.
Place 2-bead Herringbone Increases on top of each corner or peak, and regular peyote stitches in all side slots.

2 Point:        A Point Round comes after an Increase Round, and before a Fill Round.
A splitter bead is placed between each increase set, and regular peyote stitches are placed in all side slots. This round, when finished, converts the two-bead increase placed in the previous round to simply another two slots for peyote stitch.

3 Fill:           A Fill Round comes after a Point Round, and before an Increase Round.
Place one regular  bead in every slot.

Interestingly, this Hexagon Increase Cycle can be done a couple of different ways. In my sample, I did this:

1 INCREASE  (gold beads, turns into a Fill Round when Deconstructed)
2 INCREASE
3 POINT

1 FILL
2 INCREASE
3 POINT

When the Wave comes off of the Pod, the first Increase Round will spread out, and become a regular peyote Fill Round. It doesn’t matter if you go INCREASE, INCREASE, POINT, FILL, INCREASE, POINT or if you go INCREASE, POINT, FILL, INCREASE, POINT, FILL. Each will provide the correct start for the third section.

Have a look. See my first round of gold beads, is an Increase Round, and then my second round of white beads, also goes in as an Increase Round. Then a white Splitter Bead on each peak for a Point Round, a Fill Round of black, an Increase Round of black, and a Point Round of red finished my section.

Above, Step 2, completed, another look

When the Wave is removed from the Pod, the gold beads spread out and become a Fill Round. I like this so much that I usually build my Waves this way. You can see in this illustration that the Point Round at the end becomes simply a line of regular peyote stitch.

The first round of gold beads (placed as an Increase Round, and now spread out to be a Fill Round) could easily host a finishing round of regular peyote stitch (size 15 rounds are lovely for this). You need some kind of reinforcement on Deconstructed edges, because after you snip them free, they will only have one round of thread inside them, and that is no way to finish beadwork.

Start this section as usual, with a nice long fresh thread, do not weave in to start, and bead your six rounds either way. It doesn’t matter if you finish with a Point Round or a Fill Round, because each of them leaves a regular peyote line for Section 3 to begin.

If you are beading with a partner, it can be fun to do both and compare the finished results.

When you are finished with Step 2, weave in your working thread and trim it, but leave at least a little inch of your starting tail, so you will be able to see where your Section began. This sometimes helps make Deconstruction easy.

See you tomorrow for the final section, the Casting Spine, which will be worked in a turnaround method, not in the round.  See the little loops? Those are handy on the Spine, and help us remember to TURN AROUND.

: )

Hello to those of you beading along with us. It’s time to begin the third step of this Exploding PodCast demo: the Casting Spine.

No need to be in a rush to Deconstruct, or to worry about the eventual Deconstruction. It won’t be a Destruction, or if it is, only a few beads will fall off, and you will sew them back on. It’s nothing. Just be sure you have some seriously small, pointy scissors or snips handy when the time comes.

We’ll have a standard pattern for you next week, and in it you will see the organization of terms that Julia Pretl, Diane Fitzgerald and I are working toward. Then, the idea is that Julia, Diane and I will all restructure our books/patterns for the new words (Julia is contributing a gorgeous, open-source illustrated library of Increases and Decreases, which is going to be a great tool) and then we should really have something that can help people relate what they already know to the tasks at hand.

Unstructured exploration is how we do innovation – a bit of organized chaos breeds many and varied questions, and  you know – if we don’t have good questions, then we won’t have the best answers.  So in a process like this, some things will go wrong, some will go right, some will be new, and some will be exceptional.

Step 3: The Casting Spine

This is the simplest section of all.

Weave in your working tail(s) from Section 2, The Wave, and trim. Be sure to retain your starting thread, though, so you know where Section 2 went on. Being able to find the starting point of your section is really helpful in case you need a hand doing Deconstruction. Sometimes I always start a section with a hot yellow bead, or something like that, so I never have to think about it or save tails.

To start your Spine, add three rounds of regular peyote stitch in three different colours or patterns. The 1st and 3rd rounds will be two of the working casting lines on your Spine, and the middle round will be the core. It can be nice to have the core be one colour, and then each of your casting lines have some kind of counting pattern.

THIS IS A TURN-AROUND – NOT CIRCULAR PEYOTE!

Either do straight peyote with a plain turn, for a clean end to your Spine, or start with a loop, like I did.  The loop finish on each end makes the turns really easy to see, and if you like you can just pass through the loop with your thread to make the turn.

To start, I usually make a loop on the end of the thread, and leave a nice working tail at the base of the loop. Then I just start sewing onto the edge of the Wave. Never weave into a previous section in an Exploding Set.

My Spine was made like this, with two alternating colours for counting on the two live edges, and a solid colour for the core (round 2).

Step One (optional):  Make a loop, leave a 6″ tail

Round 1     Alternating two-bead placements 2 white / 2 blue
Round 2     core:  shiny gold
Round 3     alternating placement in every space, I did orange and pink

Round 4 is done AFTER DECONSTRUCTION (we will show that tomorrow) and it is a Stitch-In-The-Ditch. I did mine in all-pink, but I could have put a counting pattern into it too.

Enjoy this last step, and then tomorrow, we’ll Deconstruct the Wave from the PodCast, do the Stitch-In-The-Ditch on the Spine, and then separate the Casting Spine from the Wave.

The starting loops can be seen at each end of the Pod. They are quite helpful to have both in use of the Spine and in Deconstruction, but you can also do regular straight peyote turns for plain ends. Here is one from Nico Williams like that.

the 5-Round PodCast Bead, detail

For reasons of real-time excitement, I’ve had a few requests to hold a day so a couple of  beading groups can catch up with us, so we’ll Deconstruct tomorrow,  I’ll put up a start-to-finish video here of the entire process, incorporating the suite of questions we’ve had on the basic processes, and then on Friday I’ll do a live Facebook video as well so I can take questions.

Please add any of your own technical questions or ideas to this comment thread, and I will be sure to cover them. I’ll also be available over the weekend to answer questions and chat about Deconstruction.

What do you think of these beautiful fan-style illos that Karen Beningfield created for the PodCasts? I just love the form for showing the whole progression, from center ring through outside edge. Tell me what you think about this style of showing a slice of the whole. Is it clear to you?

the entire Exploding Set, 14 rounds, detail

Also, I added an illustration of the Spine to yesterday’s post, to clearly show the three rounds. In my Spine, I alternated red and orange for the round shown in red here, because I like to have counting markers, but it’s nice and easy to see that it is one line in the drawing if it is all red.

the three Flat Peyote rounds of the Casting Spine before Deconstruction

The drawing above is just to isolate the first three rounds of the Spine for viewing – we won’t take it off of the Wave until it’s finished with the final Stitch-In-The-Ditch round. See you tomorrow! I’m excited. The full PDF pattern will be released next week, free to all.

For those of you who have never made a PodCast Bead or done a Deconstruction, and feel confused about the forms and the process of separating the beadwork by snipping, it would be good to catch up with at least the shortest of these older videos before you tackle Deconstructing our Exploding Set.

I’ll have video of our 24-Point Podcast build and Exploding Set Deconstruction soon, but really the only difference in the PodCast itself is the size of the starter ring.

24 points = 24 beads

This is a short piece showing a couple of things coming off of a taller PodCast Bead with fewer points.

And this is a 45-minute full class on how PodCast Beads are built and how Deconstruction is done.

Morning!

1 – I’ll be posting a short video tutorial today on our Exploding PodCast Set this afternoon (I think it is nice and clear). Sorry I didn’t get it finished yesterday, but I have to record a separate audio track, as it turns out. The construction projects around our building this week are too intense.

For those of you new to the project, please consider watching at least the short video from yesterday’s post, so you can see why we began making PodCast Beads, and what a Deconstruction looks like (not scary).

2 – From 5-6 pm ( EDT/Boston time) this evening, I’ll be doing a live Deconstruction demo and taking questions on Facebook. Join us if you can with your questions, or watch later – it will save to the page. I’ll copy the video over here on the Blog if it’s possible.

One of the things that we study on the science team is noise-driven coherence, or the capture and use of the energy of mildly chaotic moments. There is a special circumstance in chaos in which things, people or materials are in a state of hum, suddenly available for new thoughts or configurations.

In that moment, many people have questions of a common theme. If those questions are productive, answers (and better questions) come collectively. And they especially love coming to me, so thank you all for helping drive the engine that has brought such clarity to me at the close of our Pattern Book project.

Coherence of questions around a common, unifying theme is just about the strongest thing humans can do. It got us into space and to the bottom of the ocean and it has surely shone a light into the heart of our goals when we started CGB.

One of the changes for the project (and the reason I’ve just let the paper books run out of print) is that we are now going to have one unified BASICS section for all of the books. And it will still be free, online, to everyone.

Books 1 and 2 will be reprinted this way, and also will be updated with new, easy bangle and neckpiece starts from Spines.

See you at the end of the day, and all of you on the CGB Team who can, please join us as well.