Math Monday: Quilted Geometric Spheres

Craft & Design Science

Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. And he has a new best-of writing collection and “lazy man’s memoir,” called Borg Like Me.

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February 28th, 2011December 8th, 2016 4

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By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Anabeth Dollind made this assortment of quilted balls, based on tilings of the sphere. These first two are spherical versions of Platonic solids: the dodecahedron and icosahedron, with twelve pentagons and twenty triangles, respectively.

Next are a spherical version of the icosidodecahedron, which has twelve pentagons and twenty triangles combined, and its dual, the rhombic triacontahedron, which consists of thirty rhombi.

And here are a couple that incorporate squares, the rhombicuboctahedron and the truncated octahedron.

There’s no limit to the possible geometric designs and fabric combinations. You just need a needle, thread, scissors, fabric, and stuffing. Choose a design, cut out polygons with a common edge length, and hand-stitch the edges. See what you come up with!

More:
See all of George Hart’s Math Monday columns

4 thoughts on “Math Monday: Quilted Geometric Spheres”

Keith Trnka says:

March 26th, 2011 at 2:57 am

These kinds of patterns are commercially used for footbag/hackysack (see http://worldfootbag.com/ for instance). If you’re interested in that, I suggest changing normal stuffing for popcorn kernels, which makes for some nice homemade footbags.
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