I've been wondering about how to draw a heart with a ruler a la curve stitching. I'm grateful that someone else has already figured it out and posted a design at his pinbroidery blog. Its creator has developed a technique of stitching beautiful designs on greeting cards. Only the heart is the result of Boole's curve stitching.
A thought occurred to me as I studied the pattern, which you must download to see. Why not make a PDF with a series of dots and instructions for the children at my school? Wouldn't it inspire awe and wonder to draw lines with a ruler and see a heart emerge?
I think anyone with some quiet time and careful attentiveness should be able to download this PDF and draw a heart. I cannot wait to let my students try it out. Please let me know if you have any questions. In full disclosure, I drew mine while waiting for pizza at Domino's and messed up three times. When I returned home, I printed a fresh copy and started over before I succeeded.
A thought occurred to me as I studied the pattern, which you must download to see. Why not make a PDF with a series of dots and instructions for the children at my school? Wouldn't it inspire awe and wonder to draw lines with a ruler and see a heart emerge?
I think anyone with some quiet time and careful attentiveness should be able to download this PDF and draw a heart. I cannot wait to let my students try it out. Please let me know if you have any questions. In full disclosure, I drew mine while waiting for pizza at Domino's and messed up three times. When I returned home, I printed a fresh copy and started over before I succeeded.
heartcurvestitching.pdf |
I've also been thinking about how much high schoolers despise math. One intimidating concept in precalculus is the polar coordinate system. What is that? It is graphing system in which you plot points based upon their radius and degrees. Instead of plotting x and y, you plot r and θ.
What if your first introduction to this concept was converting patterns you had drawn, and perhaps even designed, to polar coordinates. Why? Loading these coordinates into a graphing application or calculator reproduces a design digitally.
To assess the difficulty of this task, I reproduced the heart in Grapher. The pattern is split up into two layers. So, I broke my work up into two steps: the first layer and the second layer.
Here is where a spreadsheet comes in handy! I made a list of all eighty pins and tried to calculate the degrees. The first set of formulas were a bit off. The beauty of a spreadsheet is that all I need to do is adjust the formula and copy it to the right places. The computer does the tedious calculations for me, while I get to play.
Mathematicians rarely get things right the first time. After another tweak or two or three, the numbers made sense. Feel free to ignore the next sentence if you've forgotten high school math. I calculated the location of each pin in degrees and radians, sorted the pins in order of drawing based on the pattern, and set up a graph plotting a pair of pins in polar coordinates.
It wasn't easy!
What if your first introduction to this concept was converting patterns you had drawn, and perhaps even designed, to polar coordinates. Why? Loading these coordinates into a graphing application or calculator reproduces a design digitally.
To assess the difficulty of this task, I reproduced the heart in Grapher. The pattern is split up into two layers. So, I broke my work up into two steps: the first layer and the second layer.
Here is where a spreadsheet comes in handy! I made a list of all eighty pins and tried to calculate the degrees. The first set of formulas were a bit off. The beauty of a spreadsheet is that all I need to do is adjust the formula and copy it to the right places. The computer does the tedious calculations for me, while I get to play.
Mathematicians rarely get things right the first time. After another tweak or two or three, the numbers made sense. Feel free to ignore the next sentence if you've forgotten high school math. I calculated the location of each pin in degrees and radians, sorted the pins in order of drawing based on the pattern, and set up a graph plotting a pair of pins in polar coordinates.
It wasn't easy!
Doesn't the heart look amazing? The screenshot from Grapher on the left shows the first layer of the pattern; the one on the right, the second.