Johnson Solids Project

Last year the wonderful geometric beader Diane Fitzgerald began a community project called ‘The Johnson Solids Project’. It was a call to beaders internationally to join in making the 92 Johnson Solids out of flat peyote shapes.

Johnson Solids are three-dimensional shapes assembled from triangles,
squares, pentagons, hexagons, octagons and decagons. You can read more about them here. As beaders we’re used to working with their cousins, the Platonic solids, and sometimes also the Archimedean solids, but expanding into the Johnson solids gives us some great new shapes to work with.

I wasn’t quick enough off the mark to get in on Diane’s first series, so when Sylvia Fairhurst and Patricia Verrier started a UK version I applied as quickly as I could, and was able to choose number 48, a ‘ Gyroelongated pentagonal birotunda‘. I chose this one because I wanted to challenge myself with one of the larger solids, but fancied trying one which resembled a shape I might want to remake – this one is kind of an egg shape. It’s also made of just triangles and pentagons and they’re two nice simple shapes to make in peyote.

As with the original project the organisers specified that we should all use a set delica colour (22L) which is a bronze lustre for our increases -this gave me a bit of a challenge because it didn’t really work with my normal bright palettes, but I had a lot of creams and shell colours out to work on my sea pieces last year, so pulled a pale peach and a cream to use for the rest of each of the two shapes I’d need to make, which looked lovely next to the bronze and got making.

We all used Diane’s standard flat shapes (which are available from her Etsy shop, or if you can get it they are all found in her seminal book, Shaped Beadwork). My shape needed 40 triangles and 12 pentagons, and I chose to assemble the net as I worked (so each piece was attached in place before the next was made) – this was largely because I hate having stacks of components with loose threads waiting to be attached together, and it also helped me to ensure that I added the correct extra join beads – it’s much easier to spot errors in those if you’re joining as you go. If I’d been making this for myself I’d also have formed the overall shape as I worked, but because we wanted to have a collection of images of the flat nets before assembly, I made the net, which was actually nice as it gives a lovely view of the structure of the shape.

So here it is – I finished it in plenty of time and sent it off to Sylvia last summer – the deadline was January 2021 so hopefully soon we’ll see the UK results. The last picture Sylvia posted of the collection so far looked amazing, and the images of the full string Diane has made of the US/International version are incredible.