I’ve been playing with triangles. I’ve been playing with lots and lots of triangles.  (And I’ve also been fighting WordPress to post images for a week or two, but that’s another thing entirely.)

The triangles are making me think of Sierpinski gaskets. Which, admittedly, is not hard to do, because I went to Tech in the 1990s when all students were legally required to have posters of fractals, and Jonathan Coulton holds an inordinate amount of space in my brain. Fractals came up in conversation a few times at the KR Retreat this year.  Well, I forced people to talk about fractals a few times at the retreat.  Benoit Mandelbrot died this autumn at 85, and that led me to revisit things I’d read about him and his work.  We talked about the possibility of knitting fractals, and those patterns that attempt it.  Really, we can knit or sew tributes to fractals, and sometimes we do, but our lives are too short to complete true fractal constructions.

I was one of those girls who was good at math until I was suddenly bad at math.  The more I study educational policy and methods, the more I understand where it all went wrong between me and math.  I had a couple of horrendous teachers, and then I had a phobia.  I got by and it didn’t torpedo my GPA, but I restricted my AP classes to history and literature and government and the like.  I was very much an English major at Tech, surrounded by people with math and science intelligences I envied so much.  My big brother is excellent at math and has always been. Several of my friends understand and revel in higher maths in ways that astound me.  I surround myself with mathematicians and scientists because they fascinate me so. I’m not one of those artsy types who is proud of my math failings–I want to get better, and I hope I am. One of the reasons I love knitting and sewing and quilting so much is that they force me to engage in applied geometry and they require lots of basic computations.

Back to the practical . . .  I love the three-dimensionality of these one-seam flying geese.  But I’m tearing my hair out trying to decide how to quilt them.  Do I dare sew down all of those little wings?  Or do I dare not? Surely the finished quilt will last longer if I keep those little batik geese from catching on things and being pulled this way and that.

And then there’s the problem of the lost points.  I know there are people, better piecers than I, who can work so exactly that they don’t lose points in the seams as they assemble a top.  I ripped and re-assembled this small top three times trying to prevent biasing and lost points, and then I resigned myself to its flaws.  Despite or because of them, it’s beautiful.

When I’m not piecing triangles, I’m knitting them.  Or counting socks.  More on both later.  In the mean time, check out Vi Hart.  I wish she’d been my math teacher.

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