Repeating Patterns

It's that pause during the year before it seems like everything happens all at once.  Thanksgiving will hit, I'll need to figure out some sort of holiday craft gift, start production, and mail out items soon.  And set up a Winter Solstice Lights Spiral.  While trying to write, going to work, and other everyday tasks.  Somewhere in all of this we want to send out holiday cards, too.  

We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite.  A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits.   Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."  

---

The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.  

I was pleased with the effect, but I had a suspicion that I'd done something similar.  Sure enough, as I was going through my photo collection to try to find pictures for a family 2023 calendar, I ran across a design I'd done last spring that was virtually identical.

And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November.  I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.  

---

I'm trying to decide if Twitter imploding is a good thing or a bad thing.  

On one hand, I have some contacts with writers, Math Art Folks, archeology, Pagan, and folklore specialists that I would hate to lose; on the other hand, having one less social media site to visit might not be a bad thing—Ursula Le Guin famously did not have a Twitter account.  On the first hand, it's kind of fun to see what other folks are doing, especially when I remember to use curated lists; on the other hand, virtual friends are virtual, and none of my family are on Twitter.  And then there's the whole DoomScrolling thing.

I might post more directly to this blog and less directly to other social media sites in an attempt to simplify my life and also to exercise my ability to focus on something longer than 256 characters, which feels like it has atrophied in the last two and a half years.   We'll see how well that works; Twitter (and Instagram) make it easy to fire off a quick post.  The same quick post with Blogger takes a little more effort (fire up a computer, upload photos, write text, import photos...) mostly because there appears to be no mobile app for Blogger.  

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Wrapping Up December 2021

  I envisioned myself blogging (and writing) much more this December than has actually happened.  Part of this is due to posting to social media more than actually blogging.  I suspect that I need to have add some time-keeping software to my apps to bring social media usage back into balance.    

To recap the last few weeks.   

Through a series of events, the Day Jobbe has expanded to full time.   It's mostly remote, and I drive in to work some days.  I am doing a combination of departmental intranet design and web site management.  It has been a reminder of how brutally insurance benefits are awarded (or not) to vested employees. 

 

Writing is going very slowly, which I find it tends to do this time of year.  

My extended family is doing mostly well and managing to stay healthy during the pandemic.  

The cats have crossed another threshold with the dog and are more likely to spend the night in the house (rather than the garage) with the dog.  The cold might have something to do with this.  They also seem more tolerant of the dog in general, and no longer zip out of a room whenever she appears.  

Smokey seems to have recovered from his earlier medical emergency.  He's still as fluffy as ever, but--whether through the medicine he's taking or through the touch of age--he is bonier than he used to be.  

On the design front:  last November I sat down and decided to see about reproducing an Islamic design I've always thought was an interesting interlocking of circles, triangles, and hexagons.  As is usual with these sorts of designs, one can make it tile infinitely.  Other design projects include designing this year's family calendar and paper projects.

The Tree of History

My folks have more traditional ornaments than we do.

Since about 1972, they've always gotten a twelve to fourteen foot tall tree.  It used to be a tree that we'd cut down from a local tree farm.  One year, we didn't measure correctly, and after we got the tree up we realized that it was too tall and my Dad fired up a chainsaw inside the house and trimmed the trunk.  Another year, Mark got an infinite number of Good Boyfriend Points by throwing himself between a falling tree and my Dad's piano.

About about twelve years ago, they got an artificial tree.  Don't ask me where.  The thing is huge, and comes in five parts.  Only recently have to bottom two parts--the heaviest--been separated from each other after fusing together about nine years ago.  My folks are getting to the point where it's becoming more of a pain to set up than it's worth and this year the talk about trashing it and replacing it with a more manageable tree was louder.   (The tree has to be cinched into its storage boxes with multiple ropes, and it takes at least three people to haul the boxes out of the garage and upstairs to the parlor.)

I think they might get more Holiday Milage by setting up cones of chickenwire as a frame for fir boughs and pinecones.  They used to do that in the eighties, complete with wrapping the little crafty-trees with gold-colored glass bead chains.  One tree would be the cat ornament tree, another the music tree, and another a Santa tree.

For a while, we'd get ornaments as stocking stuffers for each other; so there'd be a set of banners, or musical instruments, or insects, or whatever.  This stopped happening when my Sister and I stopped spending the night December 24 and also when we realized the ornaments were piling up.

In the seventies, we developed a system for decorating the tree:  Stars, angels and birds went on the top branches.  Snowflakes went under the top tier, as did flower fairies.  Santas and snowmen were middle of the tree.  Mice, elves, and figures without strings should go into any "caves" in the tree.  Plastic, fabric, wooden, or crafted-ornaments made out of greeting cards and canning jar rims were "pet and child proof," so they went along the bottom of the tree.  Glass globes and plastic icicles went all over the tree.  Various ornaments were assigned to individuals as "theirs," which meant that it was sacrilegious for anyone else to hang them.  The idea is to remember the story behind each ornament:  "This is the mouse we got in 1973," "This is the bell for John and the goose girl for Julie that Aunt Margot gave."

Decorating The Tree was a big deal -- maybe less so now that my folks don't have the same stamina for five-hours-of -decorating (with holiday snacks).  Also climbing on top of eight-foot tall cabinetry now that I'm in my mid-fifteies doesn't have the same appeal as it did when I was in my teens.  And we need to do a better job of pulling our spouses into the family narrative (this year was extra haphazard).

Nowadays, I like to photograph various ornaments.  I suppose I should be more routine about it, because I'm pretty sure I have photographed the Twelve Days of Christmas ornaments multiple times.

Mark's Cereal Craft Christmas

This year, Mark worked very hard, without any help from either myself nor The Child, and created a series of Christmas Tree Decorations.  Out of single-serving cereal boxes.



The Child's Mother has, over the last several years, sent The Child a carton of small cereal boxes for special occasions, like birthdays and Christmas.  I think Mark has been wanting to do some sort of craft project with them for some time, because he had saved about thirty of the boxes.


From about St. Nicolaus day forward, he's been gluing ribbons to boxes, or cutting out cartoon mascots, and otherwise altering boxes to make them more seasonally festive.  He even got some clear plastic spheres and filled them with various cereals (which was tricky, and in the end, "Fruity Pebbles," was the cereal that best fit through the narrow bottle-neck opening).  


I like the Tony the Tiger star topper the best.

Reindeer and Firs

 Every year, we drive a short distance to a local tree farm and murder a tree so we can take it back home for holiday decorating.  We've been going here (mostly) for the last ten years.  There used to be Very Large Horses who would pull the hay wagon full of folks and their trees along the acreage, but I think they got old (or expensive) and now a tractor pulls the wagon.


Recently, Mark purchased Moose Outfits.  I believe they are supposed to be pajamas.  Or something.  The Child loved the first Moose Outfit so much Mark found a second one.  There was an attempt to get a Yeti Outfit for me, and an old Jack Skellington onsie... but I'm pretty sure that if we're getting something warm for me to wear in a cold winter house, I'd rather have a very large, hooded blanket covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs.


So... Mark and The Child suited up.  I declined to dress as a Yeti.  So The Child suggested that I grab a Nerf Gun and go as a hunter.  Mark found a kind of hunter's cap, and I put on my old brown coat.  I also put on my leopard print scarf, which Mark said didn't work for the hunter-look, but I pointed out that it was something I could have bagged.


We climbed into the car and drove past the Fern Ridge Reservoir.  The water was very low; I think they emptied the basin in preparation for the rains we'll be getting later.


At the tree farm, we got out.  Not more than twenty paces from the car, a woman asked Mark and The Child if she could take their picture together.   Then we got a hand saw, and hunted for The Perfect Tree.

 I'd say it took something like forty minutes, and we eventually settled on (another) Grand Fir (this seems to be our go-to tree to murder).  As we were tromping over the acreage, we'd occassionally hear families with small children.  Mark and The Child would then "antler up" and run through the trees.  There was at least two sets of children (and one skeptical mom) who saw the exclaimed with wonder in their voices that they saw reindeer!


Mark said (and I thought) they looked a little bit more like Sasquatches than reindeer....

After we got the tree cut, wrapped, and paid for, I took out the Nerf Gun and we got a few "hunter" shots in.  It was sort of fun, but I'm ambitious about the final results, which seem like candidates for Awkward Family Photos.

We got the tree back home, and will decorate it (or at least put it up) on Solstice.  Decorations are an interesting subject at our house -- this year Mark decided to make a bunch of decorations out of small cereal boxes, and I'm pretty sure Tony the Tiger will be the tree topper.

Holiday Craft Project: Paper Icosidodecahedron

This year for the holidays I made some ornaments.  I'd wanted to make something a little more complicated, but in the end opted out for something that would use (mostly) straight lines and wouldn't require glue to put together.

The ornament is based on a stellated  icosidodecahedron.  I cut out triangles with a circle cut out of the middle to give the design an airier feel.

The edge of the triangle is about two inches; anything smaller and it would have been too difficult to assemble.







Five triangles hooked into each other pop into a three-dimensional star shape.  (Pause to imagine giant triangles making some cool outdoor gazebo.)  The triangle edges are slotted so they'll make a five-pointed star wen assembled.

There are several ways to put the different colors together.  I like to start with five triangles of the same color to make a star.  Other times I'll surround a triangle of one color with three of another and make a banded effect.












I didn't actually link the stars together at their points... but you could, and get a giant snub dodecahedron... and I would have for this post, except that I didn't have enough triangles (it would take 60 triangles... eyes cutter-plotter).

Back to this project,... I decided to make a blue and a green star joined together with a band of purple.

Usually I put the triangles together directly into the sphere, but for purposes of illustrating how things go together, I made the two end stars first, being sure that I kept the slots on the triangles on the same sides

Here's an interior shot, showing the geometry of interlaced pentagons and hexagons.

The last triangles require a little sphere flexing to fit together.

The holes in the triangles are useful for turning the sphere into an ornament.  I suppose a larger construction could be used as light shades.

Advent Weekend

Saturday (12/5) I attended the morning sessions of the Tipree Symposium at the University of Oregon.  I wish I had had gone to the session on Friday, because it sounded like it was an incredible sharing of letters between James Tiptree Jr. and various authors, most notably, Ursula Le Guin.  

I saw some writer friends and Wordos alumni, and we had a nice lunch discussion about writer's intent, and audience, and I realized that I need to get out and socialize with people more.  

I picked up a copy of Ursula Le Guin's "Steering the Craft" (partially because I already own all of her other books that were being sold there, but mostly because I thought if I were going to own a writing manual, it should be by LeGuin), some spare copies of F&SF Gordon Van Gelder had brought as freebies, and a gift (which I'm keeping a secret).  

I read "Gypsie," a novella, Saturday night.  Wow, it was overtly a cheery tale of a failed trip to Alpha Centari.  When I bumped into Jai at the Eugene Public Library Sunday afternoon, she was saying that Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora"was in the same vein, and I recalled that I had read a short article by him about some of the feasibility problems with generation ships.  So it looks like interstellar voyages that go badly is going to be the next thing.   

This weekend was a Holiday Shopping and Craft weekend.  I'm working on a super-secret project and I think after all the prototyping and cutting and folding I've got a Holiday Craft Gift that A) doesn't take three hours to complete per gift, and B) my relatives will actually like.  

Sunday (12/6) I slept in until 8.  I'm not sure if I'm fighting off Mark's cold, or if it's the light, or if it is the three storm systems moving in, or sitting in lecture hall chairs just a little too small for me, but my body -- especially my feet -- felt sore all day.  

Holiday Paper Craft

Over the holidays, I made and gave some paper constructions.  This one is based on Moroccan tile designs, where lines zig-zagging at ninety degree angles are rotated around each other to make six-pointed stars.






I'd made this earlier, but I wanted to improve the design so there was less cutting and gluing.  After several attempts with InkScape and some failed prototypes, I came up with this net.  Printing it twice gave me the structure I needed for one sphere.






Whenever I have a design that is a flat, radially symmetric hexagon, I can fold it in to a three-dimensional radially symmetric pentagon -- and pentagons are easily turned into a dodecahedron or icasadodecahedrons.  (Think variations on twelve and twenty sided dice.)





You can see how the six pointed stars remain (more-or-less) flat, while the five pointed stars are centered on corners.  I suppose I could have creased the design to highlight the polyhedral nature, but I wanted this to look like a sphere.





The most tedious part was punching out the hanging chads from where the cutter-plotter didn't always cut through the card-stock.  The most difficult part was gluing along a seam without pulling the previously glued parts apart.

As I got closer to finishing the sphere, I poked a pencil through the construction and used the eraser end to wield the pieces together.   

For an encore, and because I had copius amounts of spare time, I designed this construction after seeing something similar on the net.  "I can do that," I said.  Once I figured out the equilateral triangles were being used to make the five-pointed stars, the rest was fairly easy. 

November 2014 Holiday Report

We had a nice Thanksgiving at my mother's sister's house.   There was lots of food.  And wine (when your cousin's a vintner, that helps on the wine front).  

Mark made a delicious (and gluten free!) cheesecake.

The cousins and second cousins (and the first cousins, once removed) get along very well.  One of the highlights of the day was assuring cousin Sameer that, yes, Oregonians in fact really did blow up a beached whale near Florence in the early 1970's.  Thank goodness for The Internet (you should have seen his face when raining chunks of exploded whale blubber crumpled car hoods).

The next day was Tree Decoration Day at my folk's house.  They do a lot of holiday entertaining, and like to get the tree up early.  It's an industrial strength artificial tree that's very tall.  It takes three or four grown-ups to set up.  

After about ten years, we finally figured out that unfolding the limbs at the bottom, one-by-one, and "fluffing" out the side branches makes the tree look a whole lot better than assembling the whole tree and then trying to fill out the places where forty-eight weeks of being in a box have flattened branches.

Although it can be cumbersome, it's much easier on the front door's frame than dragging a real live dead tree inside, there's no needles falling onto the floor, and we'll never have to fire up the chainsaw (in the house) to trim a few extra inches off of the trunk.

Papercraft in Review

 I realized that I've done a lot of  papercraft in the past year.


It all started with the stars.  For about two years, I'd been working with arrangements of stars working from inspirations in Islamic tile design, or zellij.  I had a notion that I'd be able to make zellij Christmas gifts out of dough with melted Life Savers.  The prototype runs I made were not a success.

I forget exactly how I bumped into The Artists' Pallet, but they had a Silhouette cutter-plotter that would cut designs out of paper for me.  I used InkScape to make a zellij design, cut it out, and glued the result into a cylinder.  Voila! Instant votive lamps.

My Dad's birthday is in January, so it was an easy jump to make a birthday votive using a different design based on triskellions.

Arrangements of stars still continued to be an obsession.  I'd used Blender and created some virtual 3D models of the stars and decagrams used in the Christmas votives and then rendered them into background screens.

Looking at them day after day, I started to fold them in my head and realized that I could probably fold a star mesh into various platonic solids.  I started out with an octahedron, and managed to fold up a icosahedron.














Once I had a star globe, it was a moral imperative that I pose as a Burne-Jones painting.









My sister's birthday is in February.  Julie likes fishing and she quilts.  For my birthday, she'd made me a fish quilt (which I like very much).  I thought she'd like a similar design, and I figured out a kind of light box with nested tessellating fish in it.







On to Mother's day!   I returned to the cylinder design and filled a hot pink page with mostly cut-out butterflies.  The design was hexagonal, which meant I could play games with alternating butterflies circling around common centers.

I put a smaller blue cylinder inside, which made things purple, and added a few butterflies from a second pink page.

We were having an Opera Themed Birthday party.  I wanted to go as Orpheus, so I designed a laurel wreath to wear.   I printed out six or so leaves which overlapped and then discovered that the ends of one leaf would slide through the cut-out veins of another set.  I was able to roll the leaves into a extended spiral, lock them together, and then glue them in place.

There weren't too many opportunities for decorative paper arts until my Mom's birthday came around.  I wanted make something that was kind of Japanese.  Mark said that the result looked like either a Parcheesi board or else like a kind of Bauhaus-Edo thing.  However, I'd managed to get the color scheme right, and Mom liked it.

At some point I decided that I really needed an Egyptian Eye of Horus for my new office.  I wanted something like the Eye of God over Saint Teresa of Avila... at least I think that's the name of the sculpture.  I could never quite find the photo I'd seen once on the internet or in an art book or something.

For Halloween, I'd been fiddling around with bats.  I thought that it would be easy to map a circle of bats to a polygon, but then I realized that I'd made a clockwise circle... which meant that the design was chiral... which meant I had to really think about how I was going to put the bats together without getting them crossed instead of overlapping.





Since last Christmas had been so successful, I decided to do the Twelve Days of Christmas.  The Partridge came out nicely, as well as some of the other birds, which lulled me into a false sense of security about working with the other designs.  Which were hard.  My biggest difficulty was getting carried away with microscopic details--some of which would work if I were using the whole 12 inch square paper, but which resulted in mangled sheets if I scaled them down too far.

My favorite non-bird design was the Twelve Drummer's drum.

Working on the Twelve Days became sort of like--well, like work.  So to take a break from them, for fun I started to work with a reindeer design I had.  I had a favorite paper punch which stopped working, so I used that as a base, fixed the horns, and then played with various leg placements.  The result was a reindeer trifold.

These turned out to be more successful than the 12 days.   Which was a good thing, because snow and ice pretty much shut down Eugene for a week, and I was only able to create enough of these because they were less involved to print than the Twelve Days.