The Wiggles

Yesterday the vast bulk of what I accomplished involved cutting and filling my waste paper basket with piles and piles of small pieces of wiggly thread. Eventually though, I had some moderate success.

I've been planning and sketching versions of this for ages: a pendant with two dangles ending in spikes, but I wanted a different way to capture the spikes than simply a variant of the method I've used in most of my designs incorporating these larger spikes. I wanted something with more texture, using large faceted beads, and while this isn't perfect, it's certainly workable and a decent first pass (though not exactly what I'd sketched out).

 I discovered this kumihimo effect quite by accident, playing with an online kumihimo tool - though I think it's intended for colour placement rather than bead size effects. I really like the organic chunkiness of this spiral, differing from the standard kumihimo spiral which generally has clean single lines of beads forming the spiral.

I started another last night, but used different types of threads for the two bead sizes which was a hideous mistake as it really messed with the tension. Live and learn I suppose. I guess I know what I'm doing as I watch the last few episodes of Dexter: undoing two inches of kumihimo and rethreading all the size eight beads.

I decided to make another double-spike pendant just to be certain I had it right and sure enough, the tiny variations (both relative and absolute) in the bead sizes highlighted some areas for improvement - and you can see that the two ends of this one are not identical. The lower spike has lightly different bead counts in some spots, but it's still not quite right, so I guess more changes are afoot.