Thoughts Realised

The class is over, I have a sample in yummy lavenders and purples which is now available for adoption.

Yesterday at work I received the acknowledgement that oh yeah, in fact it's true: I don't have much to do (as in nothing), mitigated by the glad news that starting today, I would be occupied with actual work. It's 8:32 ayem and I've been here well over an hour, and still nothing, but I'm still hopeful.

They wouldn't lie to me, would they?

In all my hours of killing time at a desk, occasionally I have Thoughts About Beading, and sometimes those Thoughts develop into actual Ideas, and sometimes, if nothing else competes with my after-hours time, I try them out.

In principle, this was a good and workable idea, but the bead counts in my sample preclude finishing it as started.

The plan was for five identical petals, but as you can see, there's so much room for the two remaining petals that it will not lie flat.

I'll need to make the petals bigger and probably more curved and if you look carefully, you can see that one of the petals is less curved than the others - I noticed a problem right away (though obviously not the extent of it) and adjusted in the next petal.

You can see that adjacent petals part company about four rows out from the centre. Fixing the problem in my sample could be achieved either by eliminating the shared edge completely, or by adding more rows so that the individual petals are altogether bigger. While I'm making changes, I'll probably change the shape of the junction between each pair of petals too, as it is currently fighting rather than encouraging the curvature.

If I really wanted to stick with this sample (as opposed to cutting it up and having to extract endless three-millimetre lengths of thread from the beads) I could make the two remaining petals huge enough that the overall shape would still lie flat. I might do that, just to see how it looks. Asymmetry isn't a bad word, after all.

Overall this was a successful thought experiment, as I will be able to adjust the execution to make it work, and it might even look kinda nice once it's part of a working necklace.

Stay tuned.