For those of you who would like to see the full pattern for the five-round 2-Drop PodCast Bead, here it is in PDF form.

Patterns for the Exploding Set Sections will follow shortly. Onto this PodCast Bead, we will build 12 rounds of Rick-Rack (in the round or in the flat, as you prefer) and a 2-Drop Casting Spine (using a flat turnaround so it comes off as a long line).

From the Spine, we will use the Hexagon Increase to craft a 2-Drop Spiral that loves to stack up as squares. I’ll be making a full video on this as well. 

Good morning all! A few updates on a cool and drizzly DC morning.

Publishing Update

CGB will be releasing our big Technical Section in a month or so – this is the core of our new work, and will be shown in a beautifully illustrated 100 pages of love and sweat that shows how the team has used all of the stitches, threadpaths and increases or decreases that go into our pieces, the new paths we’ve designed, and the new casting forms such as the PodCast, Spine, and 3-D Exploding Sets.  This technical section will be free to all online, sent as a gift to every bead store we can find, and included in booklet form with every paper book we send out in the future.

After we’ve finalized and printed those pages, the new books are next on the press. We’ll put all of the CGB books back on sale soon, I know they are impossible to find at present but I didn’t want to reprint any new books with old information.

If you are an artist who has made work for the books or worked on the CGB research team, you’ll be hearing from me within the next few months about honoraria and creative shares of the book sales.

2-Drop Deconstruction

Yesterday I filmed a short video showing two things: a 2-Drop Exploding PodCast Set Deconstruction, and how to do the Stitch-in-The-Ditch on a 2-Drop Spine. This is a more advanced clip in that it assumes that people tackling the 2-Drop have experience with the regular peyote and herringbone version. (photo above, work by Joy Davison, or JayDee on social media. Joy engineered the Spine as a casting tool, and so much more.

2-Drop is neat because it gives a really different edge and fabric feel. And if you cast off a 2-Drop Spine, you can use the Spine to cast off anything else you can dream up in 2-Drop. The Spines are really versatile tools, and when made with care can last for a good long time. If yours gets tired, just cast a new Spine right off of the old one.

Back with you soon with photographs of the developed and finished components released from this 2-Drop Set.

Here is the video:

I’m excited to share with you an animated tutorial on the making of a PodCast Bead, created for the free CGB library of techniques by Julia Pretl. Here is an example of the piece after 5 rounds.

We hope to animate all of our forms like this and I welcome your comments on the animation.

This is one of the final pieces we were working on for publication. VERY excited here at HQ.  More soon!

I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to see and comment on the 2-page working draft of a worksheet we created for the CGB Pattern Library.

(Click photo for larger view, feel free to download or print but be aware that this is still a draft.)

This worksheet is something that will be available to everyone for free here on our website, and we’ll also add a picture of these pages to the YouTube animation so that people can screenshot it and print it if they like.

We welcome your comments; the worksheet is a living document. It’s difficult to cover everything in only two pages (like “what do you DO with a PodCast Bead?”) but we think this is a pretty comprehensive writeup about how to make an example with 12 Points.

•    •    •

As a side note, we are asked fairly often if size 8 round beads are necessary for the center. They are only important when learning – size 11s can be substituted, but they make a much slimmer form and it can be more difficult for beginners to hold onto while learning.

Here is an example of an 8-Point PodCast made with white size 11 round beads. Colourway inspired by Claudia Furthner, beadwork by Kate McKinnon. We will be talking about this colourway (and more tactics like it) in an update next week.

Completing these pieces for the Pattern Library is one of our last jobs before the new book releases. We want to be sure we have good clean instructions (and animations) of each new form in place, so that everyone can bead along with us, whether or not they can buy the books. Won’t be long now!

Greetings, all!

We have a press date now for the new books (April 15, 2020) and that means that the new books are available again for pre-order!  Thank you to those who got on our list early – we deeply appreciate your support of the work.

CGB Volumes 1 & 2 will be for sale again in paper copies when we finish updating our new Fundamentals sections, but for now, we offer instant digital downloads in the shop:

https://www.cgbteam.com/products

I expect I’ll be answering lots of questions (and feel free to leave yours in the comments) but check the info below before writing. If you want us to look to see if you did pre-order (or you would like to update your shipping address) please email me at kate@katemckinnon.com, and we will answer all inquiries in bulk at the end of January. Please include the email address you would have used to order.

(All of the pre-order bundles are spoken for, but thank you for asking. We will probably have extra Colouring Books, posters and bead kits available for separate sale when the books are ready to ship. New posters and postcards coming soon as well!)

CGB VOLUME III, APRIL 15 2020:  We took 500 early pre-orders for this beautiful coffee-table style book, loaded with photographs and colour studies. This is not a pattern book! It is a photographic celebration of ten years of discovery. It will ship on April 15, 2020, and our early pre-orders will have a special little bead kit delivered with their books.

THE CGB PATTERN BOOK, APRIL 15 2020:  We took 500 early pre-orders for this book as well, and those early orders will ship on April 15, 2020 with beautiful bundles of extras, including a Colouring Book with origami folding patterns of our forms, and extra blank graphs for pattern-making.

THE CGB TEXTBOOK, SEPT 1 2020:  We decided to get extra-nerdy and make an academic textbook for use at the university level. We will be selling this book as a stand-alone to help fund the education team, but also donating half of our press run to schools, bead shops and libraries.

https://www.cgbteam.com/products

CGB is open-source and non-profit, and all funds earned from the sales of our books are used to pay stipends to creators, illustrators, animators, to send our education team to teach, and give travel and materials grants to students and beaders who attend our team workshops.

THANK YOU, and more soon.
Kate

photo, an innovative cast off of a PodCast Bead by Joy Davison (JayDee)

Greetings, explorers!

I’m finishing the Casting Spine video for the Exploding PodCast Set today, and I’ll upload it as soon as I’m done. I have several different PodCast Sets going right now so we can have some fun Deconstructing this Saturday at noon Eastern Time on YouTube Live.

If you’d like to see a beautiful Deconstruction from this last week when Franklin Martin and Nico Williams were here, don’t miss this one on YouTube.

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO PREFER TO WORK FROM PRINTED PATTERNS: hang tight! That is why we are doing this huge size test – to make sure our pattern is the best it can be. We will publish the full pattern for this Exploding Set for free (here on the blog and in full video on YouTube) as soon as we are done with this exploration. 

We’re trying YouTube this time for our live session as we found the Facebook platform to be a bit difficult, and the video quality is poor compared to what the camera can give. Most importantly, though, not everyone uses Facebook. So we’re switching platforms from here on out.

If you subscribe to the channel, it will email you when new videos post. Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMJSR_xARmMwr13blnymhJw

For those of you who didn’t see the Facebook broadcasts and want to catch up with Rounds 3-5 of the Rick-Rack Bangle portion, below are links to edited clips of just those parts.

The Rick-Rack is 6 beads per side for each size group, and you should bead at least 6 rounds, but no more than 12. This will give us a broad experiment in sizing that will help us finalize our printed pattern for the books. 12 rounds is enough to experiment with pattern – have a peek at this Rick-Rack beauty from Ursula Raymann.

Ursula would have had 12 live rounds, but she stopped with a Splitter bead at the points. You can always finish a Rick-Rack with a point, but for the Exploding Set, we are doing the two-bead increase at every round, including the one you stop at.

The next section, the Spine, is very simple – just six rounds of plain peyote (and remember this is flat, or turn-around peyote – we are not making a connected circle, but a long line).

As there are a few things to know about making Spines, we’ll add a full video of the creation of that section today for those of you who are new to the idea. The most important things to remember are to use a long enough thread to go for 3 or 6 rounds (no inbetween thread changes) and to be sure and do the turn. I have a neat technique or two to show you for that.

See you soon, and click the links below to view any of the videos for Rounds 1-5 of the Rick-Rack Bangle add. After Round 3, all of the rounds build in the same way, so just continue on your own until you have the number of rounds you like between 6-12.

Rick-Rack Bangle Section, Rounds 1-2, video on YouTube

Hello all!

The final video of the Exploding PodCast Set build has been uploaded on YouTube, and as you may have noted, a little extra round-by-round help for those new to Rick-Rack Stitch was uploaded earlier in a separate post here on the blog. Click the link to see it, or scroll back one entry.

Here is the video showing the finish of the Rick-Rack section (I only did 6 rounds, the minimum on this particular Set) and the build of the Spine starts. We’ll do the Stitch-In-The-Ditch on the Spines when they are Deconstructed, and they look like six rounds of silky flat peyote fabric. It’s a piece a’cake if we do it then.

This Saturday at noon Eastern time (US) we will do our first live session on YouTube, and see how it goes. It should be simpler for us all. Have fun, and I will be available all day tomorrow online and here in the blog to answer comments and questions.

There is much more coming from this amazing Exploding Set…..

Final model shoot for the three new CGB books
January 28, Philadelphia, with Kyle Cassidy!

If you’ve made geometric or architectural beadwork that you think we should consider photographing that day, please read the end of the post to see what we are looking for, and then email me at kate@katemckinnon.com to talk about shipping the work to me in DC. All artists whose work is shown in any of our books will receive a contributor’s honorarium, listing with contact info in the index, and a complimentary digital copy of the book.

Photos taken may appear in CGB, Volume 3  or the Pattern Book (shipping in April 2020) or the academic textbook (shipping in September 2020)

For this session, the talented Kyle Cassidy will be behind the lens. I’m looking forward to it as it’s been a few years since we’ve done a shoot together. Kyle has been on the CGB project from the beginning – he photographed the lovely Gabriella van Diepen and Trillian Stars for Volumes I and II, and accompanied the team many times to see and photograph the beadwork and the artists.

Here are two shots from New York City, when I spoke at the Fashion Institute of Technology for the Bead Society of Greater New York.

On the left is Marsha Carlin, wearing her own work (plus a bangle by Betty Abbott) and Joyce Chorbajian, wearing a huge Cellini spiral from Ursula Raymann (inspired by Suzanne Golden).

Below is Trillian Stars wearing a Winged piece by Robin Douglas, and a big Star brooch of mine. These photos appeared in CGB, Volume II, and were shot in the Green Room at FIT.

We’ve done photoshoots in the radar ball on top of the roof of the MIT Building 54 (!) in the middle of the desert in Arizona, and twice at the Mingei Museum in San Diego.

Above, Dustin Wedekind and I at the Mingei. Below, Gabriella van Diepen holding an assortment of Dustin’s Cones, and Ocean Tiss, wearing a Gaudi-inspired piece of mine while playing guitar on a rock at Gate’s Pass in Tucson.

If you’d like to submit photos of your work for model photography, please choose dramatic, well-crafted work that is from your own hands and head. Original work can be defined by pattern, colourway or architecture… just be specific about what was from you and what was inspired, so we can be sure and get it right in our descriptions and credits.

Please also choose work to propose that is both visually significant and as unembellished and structural as possible; we want our photographs to celebrate line, colour and form, rather than sparkles, bezels, fringe or ornament. Flat work is certainly an option, such as indigenous or tribal regalia, armbands, hatbands…. and as you can see from the photo of the cones, the work doesn’t have to be wearable to be considered.

Send sample photos (just a few small snaps) to me at kate@katemckinnon.com, and I’ll arrange with people personally for shipping. CGB will pay return shipping home, and provide labels for USPS Priority Mail shipping to DC (to arrive by Jan 26 at latest).

Above, Rayo Boursier at my place in Tucson, and below, a last shot of Trillian wearing Ursula Raymann in NYC.

All photos Kyle Cassidy, 2010-2016

Greetings, beaders. We are all suddenly in a new world, to be sure. I hope that this finds you well. Our hearts go out to all in grief.

Many are stuck at home now, but not everyone has art supplies. One of the things we will try to do in the next months is to put together some bead kits to donate and send out to people who can’t get what they need.

a BatCycle designed and beaded by Joke Van Biesen
BatCycles are modified Kaleidocycles, architecture Claudia Furthner 2017

Perhaps some of you have heard me say that the books we are finishing now are the last books of our series. This is true.  Some efforts are still in process of finishing, but the research team has completed what we set out to do. While we will all continue to bead as a team, my part in leading the project is coming to a close and shipping out the book packages will wrap my tenure.

Our timeline for heading to press with the first of the series remains mid-April, but of course the world has changed a bit and our team cannot gather – and shipping out many thousands of book packages is a team job. Also, all non-essential companies are closed or working with skeleton crews right now, so production schedules will probably slip at the printing house. We print here in the US, on the East Coast.

We will certainly release the digital editions as soon as we complete the edits and syncing, and I expect to have the first book in to you digitally in just a few weeks. I will continue to assess the situation in the next month(s) and keep you posted on when we can expect paper copies.

I am sorry to say I caught the virus and am actually sick  and in quarantine (here in DC we had a lot of exposures) but I’m 8 days in and so far I am one of the lucky ones, able to stay at home and work. However, all shipping of beadwork has stopped until our house is in the clear zone. At that time I will begin again to send home all of the work I’ve been studying and showing.

Thank you again to everyone who has participated, sent work, tested ideas, and supported our team. I’ll keep sharing layouts and photos as we go along, and if you have good, clean photographs of pieces we still need to see, or personal comments or questions. email them to me at kate@katemckinnon.com. Any direct replies to this post will appear as public comments on the blog.

Hugs, and stay well.

a lovely Winged Bangle by Angie Martin

an exceptional piece by Cliff Swain-Salomon in a layout from Vol III
(click to enlarge any photos)

below, a Hyperbolic Wave bangle by Joy Davison

In addition to animating the build of the PodCast Bead for our library, Julia Pretl has now done the basic Peyote Triangle and the Warped Square is coming next.

These forms are the basis of geometric architecture.

Please feel free to share as you like!

You can choose to reinforce the center start with a second pass, or a knot, if that’s your style, or you can wait to do that later when you finish. If you like your triangles springy and cupped, by all means make a tight start. If you like them flatter, leave the start thread loose.

Weave in the starting thread and your working thread after your triangle is the desired size, and consider reinforcing the edge with a final pass of thread through the last two rounds if you want it to be sturdy and stand up to play.

The “step-up” (moving from one finished round to the next) is beautifully illustrated here- pay attention to the final stitch of each round – to finish each round, you pass through two beads, which puts you in position to begin the next round. Your step-up will travel forward with each round.

(Step-ups in beadwork can be tricky – In some peyote patterns, your step-up will travel forward with each round. If you don’t like a particular position to begin (for example if you want to keep your step-up away from the corners) you can simply pass your needle and thread through a few extra beads after you step up to get your start where you like it.)

Julia Pretl animated the process of building a peyote-stitched Warped Square for the next addition to the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork Open Source Library.

Please feel free to share as you like!

You can choose to reinforce the center start with a few passes (or a knot, if that’s your style) or you can wait to do that later when you finish. If you like your squares energetic, springy and cupped, by all means make a snug start. If you like them flatter, leave the start thread loose and tighten it to your liking later before weaving in.

Weave in the starting thread and your working thread after your square is the desired size, and consider reinforcing the edge with a final pass of thread through the last two rounds if you want it to be sturdy and stand up to play.

The “step-up” (moving from one finished round to the next) is beautifully illustrated here- pay attention to the final stitch of each round – to finish each round, you pass through two beads, which puts you in position to begin the next round.

Thanks to Julia for making this simple, straightforward tutorial- I know it will help beginners learn in no time at all.

Greetings, beaders around the world.  I hope this finds you well. It’s been a challenging Spring for us all, I know. Here in the US we are getting hit hard, and most of the country is shut down. Delivery systems are overwhelmed, as are humans. It’s very stressful, and most of us are grieving.  I am grateful for the peace and continuity that beads provide.

As you might imagine, the printing press and the bindery scheduled to produce our paper books are mostly shut down, and supply chains and delivery companies are in tough shape. The press estimates that our books can be done in August, but it’s difficult to know what summer will bring.

If there is ANYONE on our pre-order list who would prefer to cancel their pre-order and pick up the books later when they are printed, just email me at kate@katemckinnon.com and a cheerful instant refund is yours, as always. (Include your order receipt if you want to make it easy.)

Capitola Bradshaw riffing on a Debra Schwartz idea
for a simple, elegant bangle made of four Warped Squares

•  •  •

Happily we have a great deal to release digitally while we wait – in just two weeks I’ll be publishing our new Technical Section, which I think will amaze you even if you’ve been following. This release will be free to all, and links to the content will premiere here on the Book Blog, on YouTube, and our Facebook and Instagram pages.

On May 1, one of our favorite beaded forms, the Warped Square or Hypar, will be featured in our first global Call For Work. We will be asking beaders all over the world to make and send in Warped Squares for our team to assemble into square tiles and other architecture, and we will create several huge museum installations incorporating them. Right now we are busy refining our ideas, but when we publish the official Call we will provide diagrams, counts and instructions.

Above, Sylvia Lambourg, Eggbox/Flying Carpet Tile in Assembly, 2020
Concept Ingrid Wangsvik, inspiration Kim Van Antwerp and Victor Vasarely

Thanks to a generous gift of beads from John Bead in Toronto, we will be able to not only accomplish the exhibits, but sponsor a huge project celebrating indigenous/First Nations beadwork and bead artists as well. We are so grateful, thank you Daniel John, Carmi Cimicata, and also Debra Schwartz, for suggesting the collaboration.

Tight hugs from me to you all during this challenging time. Let’s love each other, share what we have, and keep working with our hands. Those who know how to work with fabric are called to help now making masks, and those of us who can grow food, make beauty, teach children, fix things that break… well. We will all be sorely needed.

We will help each other get by.

As we cope with the uncertain situations in our world right now, our team is grateful for what beads can offer us; meditative solace, community, and a connection to an ancient practice.

Thank you sincerely to all of you who have written in to tell us what CGB has meant to you over the past ten years, while we did discovery together, like a family.  It means a lot to me to get those letters, especially now.

Kaleidocycle by Karen Westcott Lautenschlager

The books are progressing nicely to the end despite us having to do each part of the finish remotely (normally we would pile up in some kind of quorum for the final edits). Our best estimate from our press for release for Pattern Book/Volume III is still around the end of August.

As the world has come to a halt this Spring, we find happiness in the idea that over the summer, as we release and demonstrate all of our new technical information) we will be able to collect more and more photos from around the world to fold into the printed pages this August. After all, it’s your work I love to feature.

I feel like an ancient wizard in a secret grotto, at a spinning wheel… and I cannot come up and out until all of the stories are spun. Soon.

. . .

. . .

Print or use as you like to design Warped Squares with these various views from CGB illustrators Karen Beningfield, Kim Van Antwerp and Dustin Wedekind. Click on any of them that you want to view or download. (video of Julia Pretl’s  Warped Square How-To Animation at the end of this post.)

The Contemporary Geometric Beadwork project has something special on the way – an entire pallet of beads donated by the John Bead Corporation from Canada. Here is a link to their blog about the donation.

The materials are for the team to create a series of global exhibits exploring the way beads connect us to knowledge, and relating what we know from contemporary science and beadwork to the messages and understanding stored in ancient patterns and structures.

This summer, as we transition from a team making books to a team making new work, we will be reaching out to ancestral beaders from all over the world to share this gift, and create new work.

This donation was conceived in a time of plenty, but given during a time of uncertainty and instability, and that’s impossibly beautiful. Many of the artists on our team have lost their incomes and some have lost their studio spaces, their ability to buy beads. Jobs and classes and talks and exhibitions have disappeared into thin air. It’s a tough time.

A huge thank you from our team to the entire John Bead company – Mike and Daniel John, Carmi Cimicata, and the packers in the warehouse who put this together for us.

Wave bangle up top beaded by Deb Moon, 2019

Hello all! Much to report.

First of all, the donation of beads has arrived from John Bead in Canada, and this is what it looks like. Whoa! There are three large boxes of glittering Delica cylinder beads from Japan, and TWENTY boxes of silver-lined clear glass pony beads for a huge gallery installation. This is incredible.

In June and July, I’ll be working on making the boxes of Delicas into beautiful mixes and  packages that will fly around the world to our many collaborators so that we can bring our planned exhibits to life. We are so grateful for this opportunity to move forward. Thank you again to everyone at John Bead who made it happen.

I admit that things are a little strange for me now – from mixing and kitting the beads to editing and conforming all of the thousands of book pages, carefully packing and shipping work home to creators, and photographing new work, I could sure use some help here, but we can’t gather as a team. No one can fly, or even come over (for at least another month) and I’m like one of these triangles, longing for my 23 partners in the Great Cycle.

Joke Van Biesen, cycle face

I’m really grateful for those on team that are able to participate remotely – Karen Beningfield is illustrating and editing from Cape Town, South Africa, as she has done since the beginning of the project. Julia Pretl is animating illustrations in Baltimore, Kristen Ho is writing word charts in Virginia, people will edit the final drafts from all over the world.

Nico Williams is in Montreal and Kathryn Shriver is in Columbia, Missouri, and in June, they are working on framing and defining our collaborations with the indigenous and ancestral beaders that we hope to work with this summer and fall. The many talented artists who work with us all over the world continue to create, and they read pages when they can.

I am just burrowing in and working, and together, we’re all making it happen. Much has happened to me (and now the world) during the production of these new books, and still we continue.  I know the beads will also continue, as things always make holes and who and whatever we come to be as people, we will always put them on sinew or string, and ornament our clothes and bodies.

Sylvia Lambourg, four Flower Face cycle assemblies worn as a bangle

The Cycles section is the first to birth, coming quite soon, and it will be accompanied by a BatCycle beadalong and followed closely by some Warped Square mania and a huge Call for Work. In September, we expect to be able to ship our first books, if the press is able.

Here are some peeks from Cycles, from the section that shows how basic Kaleidocycles go together.

To make a BatCycle, which is a mind-bending linkage discovered by Claudia Furthner, Warped Hexagons are substituted for some of the triangles. Warped Hexes can be confusing to craft, though, so Julia Pretl is completing the bead-by-bead animation of the little sprite to make it accessible to all skill levels. When we’ve got all of that together and through edit, we’ll start BatCycling.

Thanks to all of you who have shown me such kindness and patience and creativity and fierceness as this project has slowly but surely consumed me utterly, and claimed ten years of my life with its glittering, mysterious questions. You’ll never know what your notes and works and questions an pieces of genius have given me.

Below, geometric beaded ball by Ursula Raymann, Switzerland

We are still looking at September 1 as the earliest date to get on the presses for our new books, but things are progressing nicely despite society crashing into a heap. Our team can’t gather, and it hurts, but we are Skyping and Zooming and beading and editing and we have a lot to begin sharing. It is difficult for many of us as individual humans… I know that my heart hurts.

To begin the new shares, may I offer two new academic journal articles published by the CGB Team, out now in a Special Issue of the Journal Of Mathematics and the Arts?

The entire issue is online for free through the end of the year (normally it is behind an academic paywall) so please read now, and share the link with anyone you like while it is live. Scroll down just a bit to see the table of contents.

The first article from our team is by Karen Beningfield, and it features this amazing Geometric Capture piece, a Mondrian-inspired neckpiece, shown here in a preview from the upcoming CGB, Volume III.

https://www.tandfonline.com/…/full/10…/17513472.2020.1729455

Photo by Kyle Cassidy, model Trillian Stars

The second article is by me, and the subject is the Möbius Kaleidocycle, shown here in preview pages from the upcoming CGB Pattern Book. Please share these links with anyone you like.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17513472.2020.1771648

Enjoy articles from Gabrielle Meyer (hyperbolic crochet)and more. Your clicks let the Journal know that their special issue on art is appreciated!

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tmaa20/current

Hello, beaders! It’s August now, and the madness continues around the world. We have all lost cherished loved ones (four of the older ones in my family passed away this summer, and it hurts so much to not be able to gather to celebrate them) and I have lost friends, colleagues, a couple of role models. My heart breaks for all of the suffering in the world and I am sorry we all have to go through so much right now. I am thinking of you; how are you doing? What are you making? (Remember that all replies to the blog in your email post to the web site so you are speaking to us all here).

May I distract you with some beady talk?

Did you happen to see the July issue of Beadwork Magazine? I meant to mention it earlier as they included this nice piece on CGB; thanks much to the Beadwork crew. It was so nice of them to let us talk about science as well as the artsy nature of our beadwork.

Our last post mentioned our first academic articles in a special Issue of The Journal of Mathematics and the Arts– the team had two pieces, Karen Beningfield’s gorgeous article on Geometric Capture, featuring her Mondrian-inspired Geometric Ribbon neckpiece and my article in the same issue on Mobius Kaleidocycles. The cycle article didn’t include these incredible hybrid examples by Joy Davison (below) and Joke Van Biesen, but we do plan to write them up too.

These two amazing pieces were imagined and created independently in 2019, each beader with their own ideas about hinging a hybrid geometry. Both cycles turn well with exactly enough space. I photographed them from many angles for our books.

Below, Joke Van Biesen used clear Delica beads for invisible hinges.

I’ve been so busy here, but I will keep you posted as we move toward September about the status of the press, and the capabilities of the US Mail to deliver our books (it is astonishing that our own federal government is attacking our own national mail service). This and the pandemic are strong factors in when we can ship. In an amusing, epic side note, the Audit division of the IRS is one arm of the government  working smoothly during the pandemic and I am responding to an audit of our team’s 2017 taxes. 2017 was quite the year, some of you may remember us in that year…. full of discoveries, and I went through an investigation by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works that focused oddly on why I was so interested in geometry.  Ah, the memories.

I always admired the introduction to the book by D.L. Goodstein on statistical mechanics, a difficult subject I am sure. It begins,

“Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”

This is how I feel about our mad idea to comprehend geometric beadwork. The finish of this project is a celebration of tens of thousands of hours given by hundreds of people, all dedicated to the open-source nature of our research project. There have been epic journeys and discoveries and unimaginable cycles and morphing surfaces and we have met in cities all over the world. And hundreds of thousands of us are now connected through the internet.

I can’t wait to finish the cycle and send out the books, and we are going to figure this out. Of course I want to release the books digitally immediately, but the reality of that is that it is very difficult for the team to do that for a variety of reasons, from presentation to not wanting the book to be pirated before we even get to see paper copies ourselves. We are working on the various challenges, working on everything. Like so many right now, we have gone within to improve ourselves and our presentation while we wait for the madness to die down enough to get work done.

In the meantime, we are finishing the BatCycle pattern (an amazing linkage discovered by Claudia Furthner) for our next great bead-a-long. Have a look, this is kind of astonishing. All photos are of the same piece at the same moment, just arranged differently. This is a BatCycle before the second set of triangles goes in. When I got my hands into this demo, I began wondering about all of the ways we could join and adapt this linkage before it’s finalized… this is my real-time questioning…. and I find some intriguing spaces.

BatCycles are made of Warped Hexagons (6) and geometric triangles (12), and to help people new to Warped forms learn to make the squirrelly hexagons, Julia Pretl is finishing up another open-source bead by bead animation for our library. Have you seen her animations of the Geometric Triangle and the Warped Square/Hypar? They are free on our YouTube channel, click here.

Back with you soon – my heart is with you and yours as you find your own way through all of this.

Above, a “BatHedra” element, a set of mock mirror tetrahedra created by adding triangles to the open centers of Warped Hexagons, folded in half. BatCycle architecture, Claudia Furthner, beadwork and colourwork, Kate McKinnon

I have lots of exciting news to share soon, as we are getting closer to publication of our new work.

PRE-ORDERS FOR NEW BOOKS ARE OFFICIALLY CLOSED, and I’ll be back with you in a few days when we clear edit on the gorgeous BatCycle pattern, which will be free to all. I have tried to capture the incredible variations possible with the photography, and I expect we will see a whole new wave of cycling linkages come out of it when you all get your hands on the patterns.

Thanks to all for your support during these incredible ten years of exploration of geometric and architectural beadwork. Pre-order people, I will be in touch with you via email on September 15th with a complimentary digital download and a shipping update.

Just a note -I will be reissuing Volumes I and II in new editions soon too, so if you want to sell your first editions online, now is a really good time. We always suggest listing them for no more than the cover price, $40 each, but no one’s listing will be policed. (Smiling)

See you all soon and I just cannot wait to bead with you again.

beaded Warped Hexagon by Nico Williams

This evening will mark the beginning of the free, open-source releases from the new books, and I am so pleased to finally be welcoming you into some of the finished work. It’s been a thrilling and intense five years.

I find it difficult to believe the apocalyptic scenarios unwinding around the world. Pandemic, fires, melting ice… and more. I hope you are safe, and I hope that we get to see each other again, gather and laugh and bead together again. In the meantime, I continue to move forward and hope that you will be as enchanted as I am by the upcoming release, and that soon we will all be rebuilding together in peaceful cooperation. Perhaps we will work on a national service team together. In the meantime, some of us must dream of clean air, safe children or fair governments.

I won’t be able to answer any individual inquiries until the coming weekend, so in the interim please enjoy the public release, and know that I am squirrelling around behind the scenes, readying our email lists, preparing to verify addresses, managing page edits and continuing to be grateful that I somehow ended up with the privilege of shepherding all of this genius together.

Don’t worry if you don’t have the book(s) on pre-order – I can only manage a certain level of accounting and correspondence here on my own, and we will be printing tens of thousands of books to send all over the world so that you will have a local option, an Amazon option, and all of our favorite distributors will be able to get them for you too.

If you have an address change, please drop an email to me at kate@katemckinnon.com and I’ll be sure your contact info is updated on our shipping lists.