Today's Activities Include: String Art

Here's what wikipedia has to say about string art:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_art

I was just talking to people about string art today, because I had an 8 inch circle that I did sometime at least 30 years ago that I wanted in a frame. It has been sitting against a piece of cardboard in a manila envelope in the bankers box for some large fraction of that 30 years. When I got it out to show it to R., he remarked that the ones he did weren't nearly that complicated. And when I brought it in to the framers, after I commented that this thing was a little crazy, altho I hadn't fully realized it until a lot of time went by, one of them said you'd have to be a little crazy to do something like that.

Well, can't argue with that.

So now I'm waiting for it to return, and in the meantime I thought, hey I should find out if there really was a thing in the 1970s to teach math through art using this kind of project, because that's how I remembered it. By the 70s, that whole thing was on its last legs. But here's an article about the woman who came up with this stuff: uncle had Mount Everest named after him, she married George Boole (!!!) -- and she's why I did one of these awesome circle string art things and felt like Bezier curves were really familiar when I finally ran into them in a class.

Her kids turned out great, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Everest_Boole

Of course string art has returned as a hipster-y pinterest activity. Which is fine.