Shining Bracelet Series: Main Carpet

It's always the easy ones that bite you in the rear. It seemed like a simple concept- make a series of friendship bracelets based on the carpets in the shining. And yet, it's taken a month and a half of mind numbing, brain melting, red eyed persistence to make it happen. And that's just the first one! Of course it had to kick off with the most memorable carpet in the movie:

Thinking that a suitable preexisting pattern could be altered was the first mistake. A pattern had to be made from scratch. How hard could that be?? Kids do it! So naive. Here's a small glimpse into the crazy:

That took a month. A month and a week. Almost the same amount of time it took jack torrance to lose his mind in the overlook hotel. And the prelims looked awful. And now I was losing my mind.

At this point, the hope of a direct replica was gone. It can be done, but only with about 30 strands and a lifetime of knotting. Finally, some smaller scale patterns started to emerge. The biggest issue with the pattern is that it has vertical lines, which are not easily translatable because friendship bracelets are based on diagonals.

All of these were worked into one bracelet, that ended up like this:

While the patterns themselves worked (miracle), the overall effect was not enough. It needed to show movement in both directions like the original carpet. Maybe having one centered wasn't the right approach. Let's look at it in a new way.

Closer. Love the directions, but hate that the orange is cut off the hexagons. Fast forward 12hrs, and a final pattern emerged.

And it's still not satisfying. The first pattern has a more even distribution of orange and brown. It's also closer in shape to the hexagon.

Time to take a step back. Work on the other 3 carpet patterns (leisurely), finish reading the book (did I mention that I'm reading the book?), and take a more objective look at this thing.