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 |
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!