FROM EARRING TO BALL (part 2)
(see PART 1) I ended up with several trays
holding a pile of these prints, waiting to be
made into earrings.
When I started on the job of attaching the hooks,
I noticed that, after being piled up, these earrings
had a nasty tendency to lock together.
Here's three of them holding on to each other:
After cursing this unwanted property a couple of
times, I suddenly realized that this was actually a
pretty neat way of connecting two prints together.
Happy accident !
I had also noticed that the spiral shapes can easily
be bent over the top of my finger to form part of a
sphere. So, still with spirals in mind, I came up with
the idea to make a 5-armed spiral with a small
spiral at the end of each arm, so that 12 of these
pieces could be connected to form a dodecahedron.
Note that at each "corner" THREE small spirals will
connect together, that's why they are that wide.
This led to one of those occasions where the end
result is very different than anticipated. I was
expecting to end up with some kind of round ball,
like a football with 12 slightly curved segments.
But I ended up with this instead:
Nice, interesting, but not the ball I wanted...
So then I decided to make another shape for the
piece, while still using the connecting spirals.
I also put the connectors on the sides of the
pentagons instead of the corners (so they only
connect 2 parts instead of 3).
This finally led to the birth of the beautiful
SPRING BALL which is now one of the marvelous
objects for sale at Printed In Space.
This object would not have existed if those spiral
earrings had not been so willing to stick together.
Happy accidents - I love them.
Looking back, I actually like that "failed" ball a lot.
It has a kind of Escher-like & "esoteric" quality, like
some strange artificial planet constructed by alien
angels. I think I'll try some similar-but-different
designs to see what happens. Knowing that the end
result can be quite different than expected makes
this is a fun technique to experiment with.
By the way: it happens quite regularly that "first
attempts" and "in-between" designs which are
abandoned (because they do not fit the
requirements at the time) can be used for
something else later on.
Good subject for another blog...