Hyperbolic crochet has become very popular in recent years. It has been used world-wide in various coral reef projects. The world expert in the mathematics of this art is Daina Taimina. Our latest mathematical pattern for Barbie and friends is Hyperbolic Barbie. Hyperbolic geometry is quite complicated but you don’t need to understand it to …
Author: Pat Ashforth
Carnival of Mathematics 175 – Sum Square Over The Rainbow
You might be wondering what a couple of knitters are doing hosting the Carnival of Mathematics. If you are not familiar with the methods we use to teach maths you might want to check out our main Woolly Thoughts site. It has got rather rambling over the last 20+ years. The Afghans page is a …
Tilting at Windmills
Before you scroll down, I want to ask you a question – Is this a pattern? You may think this is a totally pointless question. Try showing it to other people and see if their answer is the same as yours. You might be surprised. It doesn’t matter where we take this, or what the …
Warrington’s Geometric Car Park
This week we decided to go to Warrington – and this was the view from inside the car park. I love all these different size hexagons. This is the outside of the car park. Unfortunately, it was in shadow. There is a lot of building going on in the town centre. We really went to …
Take a fence
A friend recently posted a photo of his new garden fence. It prompted me to find some photos of our geometric fence. The house has this very small garden at the front and no garden at the back. When we moved in, over twenty years ago, there was a very old, rusted, fence sitting on …
Rolling Around
Toilet rolls have been at the front of my mind this week. That’s not something you hear often. Every week Museum Crush email digest pops into my inbox. It says of itself The Museum Crush digest brings incredible objects from the wonderful world of museums to your inbox every week. It does indeed contain some …
Magical Disappearing Unicorn
Over the years Steve has often been asked for an illusion unicorn. He has finally designed one. The blanket in the photo is much prettier in real life as one of the yarns is sparkly white and the other catches the light. The effect does not show in the photo. When you look straight at …
Sum Wear Over The Rainbow
Rainbows and circles for Barbie (and more). This is the latest pattern in the Sum Wear collection. It is a pattern for knitting three dresses, and a shawl. More importantly, it includes a mini-tutorial about knitting circles. The two dresses with long skirts have different tops. One is in garter stitch, the other is stocking …
Four Corners
I think you would have to look at this for a very long time to work out what is unusual about the arrangement of squares. Scroll to the bottom of this post if you want to know now In July The Big Internet Math-Off 2019 took place. This was a semi-serious competition to find The …
It was 25 years ago today …
… when the original Woolly Thoughts was published … and a lot has happened since then. It is very confusing because everything we do is called Woolly Thoughts but it was originally just this garish pink book. In 1994 we somehow persuaded Souvenir Press to publish a knitting book that had no colour in it …