After a bit of trial and error with various sizes of bugle beads I’ve managed to succeed in making a bugle bead version of the well-known pentagon tangle! This shape is made from six intersecting pentagons, woven together to form a rigid structure.

It’s one of a type of shape known as a Regular Polylink or Orderly Tangle, and there’s quite a bit of research into them. This particular one turned out to work with 20mm bugles, and my first attempt above used straight bugles and worked really well. My second attempt below used twisted bugles, which are a bit thinner so it’s not as stable as the first attempt.

It’s turns out to be quite difficult to find six different colours of bugles, let alone ones that go well, and as a result the first two I made are in a selection of slightly random colours For the third attempt I managed to find a variety of black, grey, white and clear beads, which is so far my favourite version.

This shape turned out to be far more challenging than the interlinked tetrahedra, and although I’ve made three of them now I still don’t have a good method to follow. However, I’ve managed to get more suitably sized bugles, so the research and development continues!