sewing and geometry: not as distant as you think
Wednesday, 28 April 2010 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yatiI think I'll share something about sewing and mathematics today, and get to other things later. I can see people running away at the mention of maths. Come back and look at the pictures -- there are no equations, I swear!
This here is something I made:
Yeah, not really special, is it. Just a ball/pincushion thing. But it is also a truncated octahedron!
Fancy name for a pincushion, don't you think? I honestly didn't what the polyhedron was called before checking Wikipedia, where there's more info and equations and numbers, but let's not go into those here.
Before this I had used an old block of foam as my pincushion. Actually that was what my aunt used, when she was living with me for a few weeks -- before that I never even bothered; I had always put my pins back into the container. Then the block began to fall apart, and I wondered if I should just make something nicer to look at. I was looking at photos on Flickr and saw the cushions people made and read how someone had experimented about making balls using fabric and I realised, hey, that's just a polyhedron. That won't be that hard to figure out.
And it wasn't. And it's more satisfying sewing it than trying to construct it out of cardboard, let me tell you that.
I like sewing and patchwork and making things. I also like maths. (I am not terribly good at either, but I get by.) I absolutely love it when my interests intersect. I had also been working on an English paper piecing project using hexagons and what better use to put the extra hexagons to?
Here's the net of the truncated octahedron, ie what you get when you flatten the surfaces of the pincushion. Yes, I'm making another one, though I don't know what I'll do with it. It'll probably end up as another pincushion or a plaything for the cat.
(I have to say that geometry was never one of my strongest subjects. I spent more time with differential equations and matrices; not that I can remember much of either now.)
Now when I play with fabric and my hexagons and other shapes I dream of other polyhedra I would like to make. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could make a rhombidodecadodecahedron? (Okay, I admit it, I like the name.) Though with 30{squares}+12{pentagons}+12{I don't even know what the name of this shape is} faces I'll probably end up with my fingers being the pincushion trying to get it right.
I also found the community![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
intertwined. Maths + crafty things ftw! Now I want to get back to crocheting or take up knitting so I can crochet/knit hyperbolic planes. XD
---
Other things of interest:
• There is a small fandoms friending meme going on! I have added Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles here. (Can you hear the crickets chirping?)
This here is something I made:
Yeah, not really special, is it. Just a ball/pincushion thing. But it is also a truncated octahedron!
Fancy name for a pincushion, don't you think? I honestly didn't what the polyhedron was called before checking Wikipedia, where there's more info and equations and numbers, but let's not go into those here.
Before this I had used an old block of foam as my pincushion. Actually that was what my aunt used, when she was living with me for a few weeks -- before that I never even bothered; I had always put my pins back into the container. Then the block began to fall apart, and I wondered if I should just make something nicer to look at. I was looking at photos on Flickr and saw the cushions people made and read how someone had experimented about making balls using fabric and I realised, hey, that's just a polyhedron. That won't be that hard to figure out.
And it wasn't. And it's more satisfying sewing it than trying to construct it out of cardboard, let me tell you that.
I like sewing and patchwork and making things. I also like maths. (I am not terribly good at either, but I get by.) I absolutely love it when my interests intersect. I had also been working on an English paper piecing project using hexagons and what better use to put the extra hexagons to?
Here's the net of the truncated octahedron, ie what you get when you flatten the surfaces of the pincushion. Yes, I'm making another one, though I don't know what I'll do with it. It'll probably end up as another pincushion or a plaything for the cat.
(I have to say that geometry was never one of my strongest subjects. I spent more time with differential equations and matrices; not that I can remember much of either now.)
Now when I play with fabric and my hexagons and other shapes I dream of other polyhedra I would like to make. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could make a rhombidodecadodecahedron? (Okay, I admit it, I like the name.) Though with 30{squares}+12{pentagons}+12{I don't even know what the name of this shape is} faces I'll probably end up with my fingers being the pincushion trying to get it right.
I also found the community
intertwined. Maths + crafty things ftw! Now I want to get back to crocheting or take up knitting so I can crochet/knit hyperbolic planes. XD---
Other things of interest:
• There is a small fandoms friending meme going on! I have added Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles here. (Can you hear the crickets chirping?)
