As crafters we all know how important embellishing a project is. That knit hat looks a bazillion times cuter with a crochet flower on it, no? Thanks to Nicky Epstein and her two new books, Knitted Flowers and Crocheted Flowers, you now have at your fingertips a variety of flower designs to take your project […]
Portuguese Thingiverse user Gonçalo Azevedo created a lampshade called Strømg Lump Leaks: The used technique is self supporting interlocking of pieces (without gluing, screwing or nailing) of 547 different pieces of polypropylene routed with a three-axis CNC. The DXFs may be downloaded from the Thingiverse page.
Made from recycled leather, these sock garters from SWANclothing are just adorable. They would go so well with the William Chambers hats posted by Katie earlier! Hello pretty leg candy… Are your brogues lonely? Your futuristic wedgie platforms and stilettos need a friend or two? SWANclothing sock garters save the day! Not just for socks. […]
Filmmaker Cristóbal Vila produced this short animation, called Nature By Numbers, which shows examples of how mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, and the Delaunay triangulation can be found in the natural world
In 2007, Scottish textile designer William Chambers took a hat-making class at Metropolitan University, creating a collection that was shown to great acclaim at the year’s Glasgow Fashion Week. Fast forward to his Spring/Summer 2010 collection, shown here, and it is easy to see that Chambers is taking this fashionably antiquated craft to new elevations, […]
The problem of tiling a plane has fascinated builders and mathematicians alike since time immemorial. At first glance, the task is straightforward: squares, triangles, hexagons all do the trick producing well known periodic structures. Ditto any number of irregular shapes and combinations of them.
A much trickier question is to ask which shapes can tile a plane in a pattern that does not repeat. In 1962, the mathematician Robert Berger discovered the first set of tiles that did the trick. This set consisted of 20,426 shapes: not an easy set to tile your bathroom with.
With a warm regard for home improvers, Berger later reduced the set to 104 shapes and others have since reduced the number further. Today, the most famous are the Penrose aperiodic tiles, discovered in the early 1970s, which can cover a plane using only two shapes: kites and darts.
The problem of finding a single tile that can do the job is called the einstein problem; nothing to do with the great man but from the German for one– “ein”–and for tile–“stein”. But the search for an einstein has proven fruitless. Until now.
Here’s an interesting design for a camera bag where you don’t have to take the camera from the bag to shoot. I’m not really a photographer, so I’d like to hear what others think of this idea. Cloak Bag
