Valley Tiles

I’m a big fan of the video game Monument Valley. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is nothing like any other game you have encountered.  For one thing, it breathes. Yes, I know that sounds weird but it does and it’s very calming. For another, it has an incredible design aesthetic, powered by M. C. Escher and Dr. Seuss, among others.

This is the only video game that ever made me go “ahh” – literally catch my breath at what unfolded. On the surface, it is a path which you help the intrepid Princess Ida navigate, but, given the Escher influence, you have to slow down and really look at what you are seeing, because things aren’t what you think they are, and trying to figure out how things work in the Valley universe is one of the most beguiling of pastimes. Like those books you cherish, you wish you could wipe your memory of them so you could experience anew the pleasure of their unfolding.

Don’t read any further, if you have the devices, go buy it. It’s inexpensive and will repay you many times over. Even after you figure out all the various puzzles, you will play it again and again just to gaze at it.

The game has a photo function and I have built quite a collection of these because of the design and the use of color:

And I have begun designing little tiles using shaped beads that have been inspired by it. Here’s one:

Beadzeimers

How many times have you come across this in your bead room?

And scratched your head and gone, what was I going to use these for?  It’s fun picking color palettes and bead shapes. I enjoy the Zen of selecting, the oooohhh when you find le bead juste and then… Beadzeimer’s sets in. Other projects are more demanding; if you stack one more bag of beads on your work table it will collapse; you laid out FIVE different palettes for this project and begin to suffer from choice fatigue. Weeks go by, and one day you encounter this great grouping of beads and can’t for the life remember why they came to be there.

And you put them back. Sigh. But picking palettes is very soothing, and good practice. Yes, that’s what I tell myself.

Well, I can’t leave it at that – so here’s a palette I enjoyed picking: 

This loomed wallhanging was inspired by a photograph of an iris, and I was pleased at how the ombre effect came out.

Can this Necklace be Saved?

There was a column in the Ladies Home Journal I remember reading in my youth back in the Stone Age (the late 60s early 70s) titled "Can this Marriage be Saved?" which has inspired today's ruminations.

I can't remember if it was the first or the second time I was making a piece from a specific pattern (probably the second - I have a theory about the second time you try to follow a bead pattern, but more on that another time), but whatever time it was, I used the wrong size spike beads.

Here's the original design by Sabine Lippert titled “Handle with Extra Care” that uses 7 x 17mm Czech spike beads.  You can find it here.

 Well, in putting together my beads for this piece, I pulled out instead the 18 x 12mm bruisers and couldn't understand why the pattern wasn't going the way it should. It kinked and folded and would not behave. I had plans to make a necklace out of it, omitting the spikes along one side so the wearer wouldn't spear themselves in the chin, but it wouldn't lay right.

So I turned it into a round pendant, added a bezeled rivoli, crocheted beaded straps and lo! this beadwork was saved from the dreaded Drawer of Unfinished Projects. YAY!