After years of throwing myself into other crafts, my sewjo has finally decided to ascend once more. Don’t it figure. I’m suddenly inspired to pick up abandoned digital projects, like my castle, and reimagine them as art quilts. I want to hand sew allllll the hexies. But mostly, I want an organizer for my hand sewing, so I don’t have to lug the wooden tray around. I’d also like to know when I decided hand sewing was a thing.
My practice hexies were questionable and helped me tighten up my basting techniques. The new clips are the perfect size for EPP and it’s interesting how using offcuts or striped blocks affects things. But, as much as I love blues, I do best with a pattern, or at least an overall design, in mind. To that end, I pulled out the fabric set aside to a make cushions for my reading chair.
I had a vague idea about piecing together something simple (3 solid color blocks max) for a pair of 12″ x 20″ lumbar pillow inserts. The fabrics aren’t really that well matched, weave-wise, but I like the colors and textures. The purple is leftover from the 20’s tuxedo with tails CJ wore the year he was the Joker, and the blues were from an old set of kitchen curtains. So far they’ve folded beautifully. I should have enough in the next day or so to at least start the design phase.
This is my first EPP project, so rather than break my brain immediately, I’ve stuck with two sizes of hexagons and half hexies of the smaller size to marry them. I’ve also paired each fabric with a specific shape to focus on the tessellation.
Picked up a thimble kit so I could test out the full range of finger armor. The classic metal with ring around the tip remains my favorite.
As lovely as hexies are, they are not quick. Now that I’ve mostly worked out what I need to have at hand for EPP, I did some online pattern searching for a better way to transport it all. I settled on this one.
I like the overall geschalt of the thing, but it still ooks a great deal like the diaper bag it was based on. One of the benefits of small consumables is that they don’t have to blend in with the decor. To that end, I rifled through my fabric stash for something that looked sufficiently fun to carry me through the slog that is the opening gambit. Monotony, they name is fabric cutting. The fastest way out is through.
Goriely was immediately gripped by the discovery of soft cells within the nautilus shell. “I find it is quite natural for shapes in nature to go that way because forming sharp corners is very costly,” Goriely says. Biological cells are soft, and surface tension will naturally round them off unless the organism expends energy to build rigid structures that can hold pointier shapes. And cells within a living thing want to fill space efficiently with few gaps.
In their three frantic days at Oxford and the months that followed, Goriely and the Hungarians identified more and more examples of soft cells in nature and art. Zebra stripes, river estuaries, cross sections of onions, seashells, heads of wheat, red blood cells, plants and fungi all resembled 2D soft cells. And in architecture, 2D soft cells lend futuristic, organic forms to many buildings by architect Zaha Hadid. They also appear in sketches of tatami and clothing by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who made the famous 1831 painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa, as well as in the art of Victor Vasarely, the “grandfather” of the optical art movement.~Elise Cutts
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
ScientificAmerican.com, 19 November 2024