Quilting, Crocheting, and Math! Oh my!
I've had this idea for many years, to make a
penrose
triangle quilt.
In the same way that you can tile a plane
with equilateral triangles, you can tile it with
(2D representations of) Penrose triangles. Just
make the obvious connections on the edges, and you
end up with what looks like an intriguing but
impossible thicket of girders. Once you do this,
you can see that the tiling, as a 2D pattern,
consists only of triangles and trapezoids, and all
of the trapezoids are exactly the same size and
shape. (Should be different colors, though.)
I hope to have an illustration of this some time
soon, but anyway, it just seems like a very easy
kind of quilt to make, for those who make quilts.
It's only the edge parts that require any thinking.
Astoundingly, I couldn't find any examples of the
tiled pattern that would make up the quilt
that I want to make. I'll look or make or draw one.
One problem is that this is a tiling made up of
Penrose Triangles, but there is a
better-known
tiling of the
plane (the (first? only? simplest?)
aperiodic one), which is also due to Penrose,
but is otherwise unrelated to Penrose triangles.
This makes it hard to google for the one I'm seeking,
though it does
relate to the quilting angle.
At any rate, all this reminded me of some
wacky knitting I saw, where people
knit 3D representations of mathematical surfaces
and objects (Moebius strips, klein bottles,
space-filling superfolded things, braided items, etc).
Fun stuff.
Finally, I had to link to a list of
wannabe
entrants in the "Worst quilt in the world" contests.
11:32:00 PM
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