Colour Blocking

Above, a close-up of the pinks and violet in Sam Norgard’s Nova Scotia bangle.
Bead colours: DB2035, DB1310, and DB2138.

There is a lot of fun to be had making colour-blocked triangles, and it’s one more way to explore the relationships between shades, tones, translucence and different bead finishes. Three-colour triangles that follow the lines of the coat-hanger shaped quadrants are simple to make – they are started with a ring of beads A, B, C, one of each colour, and then from that point on the increase lines are split, with one colour on one side and another on the other. If you have Sam’s Nova Scotia bead kit, you can re-create this colourway exactly, but if not, why not make a few triangles from your own beadbox, playing with groups of three different beads together?

In this face, Sam deployed a gorgeous transparent fuchsia (DB1310), a Luminescent hot pink that will glow in UV light (DB2035), and a matte, opaque Duracoat violet (DB2138). The three different beads have very different reactions to light, and almost glow in your hand simply from their contrasts.

When you are ready for a bit more of a colour mix, why not try some six-colour triangles as well? (Downloadable word chart below.) Joke Van Biesen created a range of beautiful triangles like this for a cycling ribbon piece, which could be folded like a flexagon or dimensionally, to enclose space. We will show it fully in the CGB Pattern Book.

joke_ribbon_triangle_5Download

About katemckinnon

Kate McKinnon has devoted herself to the study of how things are done, and how they could be done better.

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