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Lesson Info

The "God's Eye" Variation

So a second variation that you might want to consider instead of using a hoop is what I've been affectionately referring to as the gods I version these look very much like perhaps the camp craft you created as a kid and I've seen them on the traditional pie on keys and I think there are bright, colorful way to add a little bit of a fiber art into your project on and they're actually a lot of fun to make a cz well now I want to kind of show you a little bit of the evolution of how I developed this central portion because traditional god's eyes basically used to dowels that you cross over in the center and you wrap with yarn now for the pie on key I wanted to have six spokes which would mean three pieces of the dowel and when you wrap three pieces of dowell on top of one another, construction gets a little bit challenging because you're working with these rounded pieces that don't naturally want to sit on top of one another so my initial thought was, well, let's use some flat would dowel...

s in the nice thing about these is that they did come together really nicely I was able to use some wood glue I clamped it in the center and allowed it to dry for about thirty minutes and got a nice structure um I went ahead and wrapped this with yarn but what I found is the back is still really lumpy. You're dealing with a lot of different height variations, and I think technically this would work, but I was kind of out to get something that was a little bit mohr refined and perhaps a little bit more elegant in its construction, so I came up with an alternate solution, what I did to create a structure that looked like this one, where it's all flat on one level is I cut out all six would spokes out of a three sixteenth inch dowell, and then I glued them onto a couple of wood rounds these air about an inch in diameter, they're relatively inexpensive, you confined them easily a craft supply store, and so to do this, I created spokes that were roughly six inches in length. So if you take your dowell and again utilizing either a cutting matt with a ruler on it or a yard stick, go ahead and measure out six inch increments and you want six pieces in total. Now, as I had mentioned during our review of materials, the dowels are relatively lightweight, especially if you're only dealing with something that's three sixteen seven inch now, if you were making a larger structure and dealing with towels that were perhaps ah, half inch in diameter or larger, you definitely would want to implement like a hand saw some sort of tool along those lines versus a heavy duty pair of shears, but with these I can simply sort of cut into it, rotate the double slightly and I get a relatively easy cut. Now my end is still going to be a tiny bit rough, so what I would do is take a small piece of sandpaper is is ah, medium grit on just to kind of get rid of any potential splinters at the end of that and smooth it out just a little bit. You can also kind of dull the edges a little bit, so there's nothing sharp, but essentially you want to cut six of these and so that you don't have to sit and watch me cut dowell I went ahead and pre cut these for us, and we're going to go ahead and create our structure using those now preheat your glue gun you can see mine is already starting to drip, and I find that when I'm working with a hot glue gun and this is ah high temp one versus a low temp um I find that the binding qualities of the high temp glue tends to be a little bit stronger you want to work on something that's going on, protect your work surface so as you can see here I'm just using a small piece of corrugated cardboard one other thing that you're going to want to make note of depending on the type of yarn that you're going to use, you may want to create notches in your dowels here's an example of one that I went ahead and cut notches in it's just going to give your yarn a couple of grip points along the length of the dowell, because otherwise the tension of stringing at a certain point is going to cause most of the yard to want to pull towards the center, and you're not going to get this nice, even stretch of the yarn when it's wrapping around. So to do this, I simply take a double piece that I've cut out, take a craft knife, and honestly, I'm just cutting really shallow wedges into it, and I'm going to do this at about inch intervals all the way down the length of the dowell the other thing that you'll want to do and this is going to make construction a little bit easier for you later on, is I would measure about a half inch from the edge of the dowel and creates sort of a scoreline all the way along the exterior of the dowel, and then maybe notch it in just a little bit with your sharp blade. What this is going to do is this is going to give the string that we used tio create the upper portion of pie aki and connect to this central portion it's going to give it a groove to rest in and it's going to create the same effect the other groups you're creating along the length of the dell it's going toe prevent it from slipping in towards the center so just a little construction tip there so I've gone ahead and I've prepped several dowels with the notches in them and we're going to go ahead and construct our gods I structure so I'm starting out with one of these one inch rounds and I'm going to take two of my dowell pieces now I want to make sure that the ends where I measured and a half inch and made the little notch for the tying strings are not the portion that I'm gluing I want this to be on the outside, so I'm going to take my inner portion and I'm going to put two dots a glue directly across from one another on the wood piece and then I'm going to take these two double pieces and I'm going to press them into the hot glue and the wooden rounds that I'm using as I mentioned there about an inch in diameter so I'm leaving probably a quarter of an inch between the two would pieces and I'm just going to press them they're allowing the glue too cool for just a second and set up now for the remaining four dowels that we're going to wait here, tio are wooden disks. You need to be a little bit mohr conscientious of their placement. The goal here is to create equal, distant spokes around the exterior, so we're still going to put two pieces that are directly across from one another. But I'm going to place to here and to hear so that each of our little pie shaped segments arm, or or less the same distance from one another. So again, I'm going to take a little bit of hot glue. I'm gonna place it just opposite one another on our would round, and then I'm going to press the two ends of two additional dowell pieces down into it, and I'm going to hold them steady just for a second. The hot glue dries really quickly sets up really fast, but you do want to give it just that second to harden up, and now we're going to add our final two pieces, so I'm going to go ahead and put a little hot glue on either side. Take our last two dollar pieces, press them down into the hot glue and hold them in place, so our final structure is going to look a little bit like a wheel with equal, distant spokes around the exterior, so now that I've set that up, you can see that's what the structure looks like now just to give it a little bit more stability and make sure that the dow will stand place, I'm going to go it in and kind of fill in some of the spaces with the hot glue you can see I'm being a little bit generous with it. I'm filling in some of the spaces, you know want to go overboard because you don't want it, tio, when you put the second piece on top to squish out all over the place, but enough to sort of hold it steady and then I'm going to take a second piece of the wood round and I'm going to place it directly on top like a little sandwich, and I'm going to press it down firmly and hold it for just a few seconds while the hot glue sets up. Now, if you do get some of the hot glue coming out the sides not to worry once it's dry, you can go back in with your craft knife and sort of carve out some of that excess. So this is what you end up with now. Uh, if you are a crafter of a certain age, you might remember tinker toys from when you were a kid and that's what these tender reminds me of. They were sort of ah construction building kits where they had these central spokes that you could put various dowels to build structures into and that's what that reminds me of but this I think is a much more elegant solution to the gods I because now we're all on one plane we don't have any variances in the height of the towels and we're going to be able to easily wrap our yard all the way around, so I'm going to go ahead now and set my hot glue aside and my additional dowell pieces and we're going to talk about yarn now in the projects that I'm going to complete say the pie on key that we're going to complete together I'm using a fairly thin three ply mexican polyester yarn that I particularly like just because it's really thin tends to give you a fairly detailed graphic look to it, I'm able to kind of create these sort of patterns relatively easy where I switch between colors and do a little bit more graphic dark color in her spacing between them. But I will tell you if you're working with a thicker yarn, the wrapping process is going to go a whole lot quicker and for the the demonstration I'm going to show you now I've selected two shades of blue wool it is a worsted weight which is sort of a medium thickness and it's also a wolf which I think has a really nice feel to it in there beautiful colors so the way we're going to start us pick any one of your spokes take the end of your yarn and just tie a tight knot around one of the spokes and I hold this up and show you just so it looks like that you just got it doesn't matter which of the spokes just go ahead and try it on and you can actually even leave this tale off to the side and will trim that but the way the wrapping process goes is this you want to go underneath the adjacent wrap around it over to the next one underneath around it to the next one underneath and you kind of see the pattern we're creating now what we do want to do is we kind of want to push those loops that air wrapped down so they abut that centerpiece and you just kind of continue rapping now if you've got some of these tales and it's problematic for you can just go ahead and trim that off and then continue your rapping process this is a little bit of a meditative it's going to take us a few minutes to get through it but I really do love this process and as you continue to build from the center you start to see a pattern develop on one side that really does resemble a spider web these are um like I said reminiscent of camp craft that I created a kid and I'm sure many of you did as well we'd take popsicle sticks and glue them tow one another in the center and wrap yarn around them and then hang them up his ornamentation this is a nice process to do also while you are listening to podcasts or watching movies it's something that you'll kind of find the rhythm of and be able to at least pay half attention something else playing in the room now as I mentioned, the notches that we made in the dowell are going to be helpful and sort of keeping the yarn in place as we wrap it prevents it from bunching and sliding in towards the center you're going tohave less of an issue with that with thicker yarns versus the fine thin yarn that I'm going to be using that almost is the same thickness as perhaps paralyze cotton or embroidery floss she can see on one side we're getting this ribbed effects and on the opposite side it's starting to build a very even regulated surface now I do want to show you if you want to switch colors now between the two give yourself ah little bit of length a tale cut that go to your seconds color put the tail side by side and create a little knot we've got a little not there you don't need to trim that actually right away leaving it with a little bit of length is going to help us conceal it momentarily, so now I'm going to go back to my wrapping pattern, wrapping it around, and you can see it seamlessly, then goes into the second color, you can get incredibly creative with the coloration that you use on your god's eye portion. One of the things that I'm excited about showing you are some different variations of the pie on key, we're going to create some that are incredibly colorful, bright, loud and cheerful, and then we're going to style some that are a little bit more of a muted palette. Um, that I think if you were to have hanging in your home year round would make really beautiful piece of interior decor. So again, as you're rapping, if you, you know, get some that are a little bit higher up on the dow, all youse want periodically push them down towards the center, and then once we get to the point where we have notched the wood, it's that's going to act as a stop gap and it's really going to hold it in place nicely. So, like I said, with the thicker yard, it does go a little bit quicker, but it still takes a little bit of time I started with the thicker wool just to kind of give you an idea of the wrapping pattern you can again see now that we've got about an inch on their this beautiful sort of flat surface on one side, and then I think, really the equally beautiful ribs reverse side, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch out to a sample that I've taken the time to complete beforehand, and this is one I have mentioned I have been working with a thinner yarn, so it took a little bit more time to complete this, but I'm really happy with the outcome now. When I switched colors and tied the arms together, I left longer tails so that once I was finished wrapping all the way around, I could kind of easily tuck them all to the back side. I'm considering the rib side, the backside on die just sniffed the tail short, so you can kind of see throughout all of the areas where I did tie the two colors together, but the really non obtrusive and once the entire mobile is constructed, they're really just going to disappear into the detail. So that is your god's eye structure. I honestly think they're really beautiful on their own, and perhaps this is a side project that you create, but it's also going to be a really lovely center portion to our pie aki chandeliers