Making Process
In Artisan Yuko's own words
I’d been doing circle layouts for a while and wanted to try something different. A ring — where the beads form a border and the center is open — seemed interesting because I hadn’t seen many examples of it.
The thinking emoji felt right for this shape. The face fits naturally inside the ring, and the expression has this slightly asymmetric quality (one raised eyebrow, the hand gesture) that I thought would look interesting at scale.
19 colors ended up being necessary. I tried cutting it down to 15 but the face started looking wrong — faces are really sensitive to over-simplification. The eyebrow especially. If you merge the wrong two tones it just looks like a blob instead of a raised brow.
The ring format made ironing tricky. You can’t just press down normally because the open center has nothing supporting it — it flexes and you get uneven fusing. I ended up flipping the whole thing face-down on a flat surface and ironing from the back. Worked much better.
Probably my favorite piece I’ve made. The ring framing makes it feel more like an art object than a craft project.
