A little while ago I wrote about the Beaded Johnson Solids Project set up by Diane Fitzgerald, a project to make all 92 Johnson solids out of beads. I volunteered to make number 68, the Augmented Truncated Dodecahedron. After a lot of time spent making decagons here it is!

I’ve named the beadwork version Reflecting Pool. In total it’s made from 11 decagons, 1 pentagon, 5 squares and 25 triangles. To give a better idea of the shape here’s an animation of the polyhedron made using Stella4D Pro:

Here’s the net of the beadwork shape before it the final assembly. I think it looks like a series of connected pools, which is where the name Reflecting Pool came from.

Before I started joining the beadwork net together I did a trial run with a paper model – fortunately my beadwork skills are better than my papercraft skills!

I really like how the shape turned out. The decagons seem quite sensitive to even the small size variations in the beads and so ended up slightly concave rather than as flat as the ones I made initially. However, I really like how they end up looking when joined together.

I’m tempted to make a plain truncated dodecahedron, with just decagons and triangles, however it might have to wait a while until I manage to make 12 more decagons!