Wintery Mini Ionic Polyhedra

Earlier this year I purchased the Instant Holiday Glam: Color Palettes of Splendor PDF from Margie Deeb, which is full of many interesting and unique combinations of colors for the holiday season. I found some of the color combinations in this eBook quite nontraditional, but on the whole it really got me thinking about new ways to play with color in my beadwork this holiday season.


When I experiment with new color palettes, I like to try them out on a small beaded bead before moving on to the rest of the piece or a larger project. In this case, I wanted to weave a beaded bead with 30 edges, so I made one with 12 edges first to test out the colors. I chose one of Margie's holiday color palettes consisting of silver as the base color, dark rainbow blue as the secondary color, with gold as the accent color. I started by trying it out in this Mini Ionic Octahedron (à la Gwen Fisher of beAd Infinitum):

Unfortunately there's just too much blue in this beaded bead to match the desired color palette, so I made an adjustment to add more silver:

I liked this one better, but I still thought that its silver-to-blue ratio was not quite right. So I switched the structure of the beaded bead from a Mini Ionic Octahedron to its dual, the Mini Ionic Cube:

This accomplished much of what I was going for. The more open structure of the Mini Ionic Cube shows off the round silver beads more than the Mini Ionic Octahedron. 

Satisfied with my color palette, I moved on to the 30-edge structure. There are two regular polyhedra with 30 edges, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. I felt that the dodecahedron would result in a more open structure, thus showing off the round silver beads more compared to the icosahedron, so I chose that polyhedron and made a Mini Ionic Dodecahedron:

Neat huh? I found it quite satisfying to weave.

 Though hollow, it's remarkably sturdy:

This beaded bead is going to make a nice little Christmas ornament. I think I'll pair it with its cube cousin to make it a stacked ornament. 

The Ionic Polyhedra pattern is available at beAd Infinitum, and it explains in great detail how to weave the Mini Ionic Octahedron and Cube and about a dozen other polyhedra. The Mini Ionic Dodecahedron is one of many variations to this pattern, and should be pretty straightforward to weave for anyone familiar with other dodecahedron beaded beads.