Category: International Beading Week

Beadwork, International Beading Week, Polyhedra, Tutorials

Interlinked Tetrahedra Tutorials

Posted on by beadmechanics

Five Colour Interlinked Tetrahedra

The original five colour version of the bugle bead interlinked tetrahedra is available here as a pdf: Five Colour Interlinked Tetrahedra Tutorial. This version uses a different colour for each individual tetrahedron.

Three Colour Interlinked Tetrahedra

A three colour version of the interlinked tetrahedra tutorial is available here: Three Colour Interlinked Tetrahedra Tutorial. This version uses three different colours of bugles in each tetrahedron.

The animations above were made using Stella4D Pro.

Additional Colourways

Diagrams for other colourways are available here: Interlinked Tetrahedra Additional Colourway Diagrams. These are diagrams for each step for the silver-yellow-green, yellow-orange-red, silver-blue-purple and green-yellow-silver-blue-purple colourways.

newcols

Kits

Kits for both versions are available in my etsy shop!

BeadMechanics_InterlinkedTetra_Kit3

Happy Beading!

BeadMechanics_InterlinkedTetrahedra

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Beadwork, International Beading Week, Tutorials

Happy International Beading Week!

Posted on by beadmechanics

It’s the start of International Beading Week! The week is a world wide celebration of the craft, aiming to bring beaders together and encourage people to try some beading!

IBW Logo

There are a lots of events being held this week – you can read about them here. There’s also a wealth of free patterns that have been donated by designers all over the world in celebration – and you can browse through them all here.

This year I’m acting as a Guest Ambassador, and as part of that I’ve written a free tutorial for the bugle bead interlinked tetrahedra design!

InterlinkedTetrahedra_BeadMechanics

You may remember this shape from a previous blog post about it. It’s based on the origami model Five Intersecting Tetrahedra by Thomas Hull. With his permission, and with the help of the brilliant geometric software Stella4D for the diagrams, I put together a step by step guide on how to assemble the beaded version. The pdf of the tutorial is available from the IBW downloads page and is also linked below!

The piece is a fun geometric challenge, and requires very little previous beading experience so is suitable for anyone thinking of trying some beadwork for the first time as well!

Happy beading everyone!

People Chain x 12

Click to access BeadMechanics_InterlinkedTetrahedra.pdf

People Chain x 12

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Beadwork, International Beading Week

International Beading Week

Posted on by beadmechanics

I’m really pleased to say that I’m going to be an Ambassador for this year’s International Beading Week! I’m already planning beading activities and putting together some patterns and tutorials to share with everyone to celebrate the week!

IBW Logo

This year International Beading Week (IBW) takes place from the 25th July to 2nd August. The aim is to bring beaders together and inspire people to take up the craft! More details of everything that will be happening can be found on the IBW website.

As a start I’ve been doing a bit of work creating pdf versions of the free tutorials here on my website! Hopefully this will make them easier to save and print. Here are the first two!

Spherical Harmonics

Spherical Harmonics is the Rick Rack Dodecahedron – which finally has a name! Spherical harmonics are a type of function defined on the surface of a sphere which have many uses in maths and physics. The visualisations of these functions remind me of the shape of the rick rack dodecahedron.

BeadMechanics_SphericalHarmonics

Trefoil Knot Kaleidocycle

Did you know that the trefoil knot kaleidocycle is also a Mรถbius kaleidocycle? If you use a different colour for one edge of the band of tetrahedra you’ll see that it has a twist when you join the ends together to make the trefoil knot!

BeadMechanics_TrefoilKnot

The pdf versions of the folding cube and gyroelongated square bipyramid kaleidocycle tutorials will also be available soon!

People Chain x 12

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