Hexagonal 4-Strand Flat Braid

This is a braid I really like the hexagonal look of. I've made versions of it with yucca, palmetto, and strips of paper. I want to try making a longer strip and sew it together to make a coiled basket, but I'm not sure how.

I first came across this design in a book called By Southern Hands: A Celebration of Craft Traditions in the South by Jan Arnow. It wasn't a how-to book, so I tried to do more research online. I found many examples of how to make this braid, and it was really cool to see versions of it from different cultures. In Louisiana, it's a technique from the Houma to braid palmetto strips. I also found versions of it in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the UK. I found some examples of it connected to wheat straw harvest and Palm Sunday decorations. Most of the uses are just for short lengths. It doesn't seem to be very common pattern, but historically was used to make hats or bags. I couldn't find any info on how to sew coiled strips together, other than the general description that it was overlapped. It looks like the base for Houma bags or baskets was woven separately in a different style.

Resources

Louisiana- Houma Palmetto braiding by Marie Billiot Dean

https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/Houmaarts.html

https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/images/Houma/p22.jpg

https://www.nsula.edu/documentprovider/docs/860/Dean,%20Marie%20Billiot.pdf

Arnow, Jan. By Southern Hands: A Celebration of Craft Traditions in the South. p 44-45

Bermuda- Fishtail braid of palmetto

 Of Fishpots, Bonnets, and Wine: The Cultural History of the Bermuda Palmetto, Anna Saskia Wolsak  

https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0362882/4 p 144, p 151

Bahamas- Jacob’s Ladder plait of palm fronds

 https://www.grandbahamamuseum.org/exhibits/culture/plaiting-and-thatching

Hawaii- nihoniho headband with hala tree leaves

      Bird, A.J. et. al. The Craft of Hawaiian Lauhala Weaving

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Craft_of_Hawaiian_Lauhala_Weaving/

 

New Zealand- Maori whiri mekameka (flat four plait) mostly for headbands with New Zealand flax

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Hjmueusvw 

Russia- Zubatka (fish plait?) with paper tubes

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMCYr5qo4pI

https://stranamasterov.ru/node/438796

UK/Europe- Tyrolean or Rustic Plait with straw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9TEyuRJAs

https://www.hatplait.co.uk/plaits

Valentine Card Ideas

 This a project from several years ago that I came across in my keepsake box. We made Valentine's day cards from scratch for my son's elementary school class. 

The front of the card featured a clear bubble full of sequins. I started with stiff paper and clear plastic, probably recycled from packaging material. We added sequins between the layers, and then sealed the edges with a tiny bit of hot glue. I think we tried taping two clear layers together, but it was more difficult to go around the curved edges. Then the finished bubble could be taped or glued to the card, and was fun to shake like a snow globe.

Nature Play- Flower Dolls

I've been thinking about collecting some of the "nature play" projects from when I was a kid- way back when we went outside to play, and had to amuse ourselves without smartphones. Some of these ideas are from books, some are from my grandmother, and others I probably made up on my own.
The first one of these is a doll made from crepe myrtle flowers. The flower buds and frilly petals have shapes that work as head, arms, body, and skirt. These are delicate and temporary creations.  Perhaps a parent could make these creatures with flowers their child gathers if the small scale is too difficult for them to work with on their own.

Flower person #1- I used one full flower with stem as the body, a grass stem for the arms, and an unopened bud for the head. I used a mechanical pencil to poke holes for the arms and neck, and drew the face by scratching it on. I squeezed the unopened bud to reveal the "hair" color and a hint of a crown shape. This version could be made spontaneously outdoors using a twig to poke the holes.

 Flower person #2- I started with a branch with one open flower and two unopened buds for the body, and an old flower for the head. First, I pinched off most of the two unopened buds to form the arms. Then the old flower without petals fit over the stem, sort of like a bobble head. For this one, I used a marker to draw the face. This is the simplest of the designs and doesn't require poking holes in the flowers.

Flower people #3- I started again with a branch with one open flower and two unopened buds for the body and arms, but this time I left the whole buds as hands. I used a different color flower for the head, poking a hole for the neck to fit in. I pressed the petals down to style the hair, and drew the face with a marker. The flower baby is a tiny unopened bud with a hole poked through it, and a single petal.

Making a 3D Object with TinkerCAD

This is an example of how to make a 3D object with TinkerCAD.com. First, you would sign up for a free account on the tinkercad web site. Once you're logged in, click the button for Create new design.

I chose a couple of basic shapes, and dragged them out to the work plane. There are different points you can select to stretch, move, or rotate each shape. It's difficult to figure out which point does what.

Dragging the right mouse button rotates the plane. Pressing shift while clicking on each object will select more than one at a time.

In this view, you can see that I don't have the shapes lined up and stacked together the way I wanted them.

In addition to basic shapes, there are also options for text, shape generators, and other pre-made parts. I added a shape generator called Fidget Spinner and customized it.

The next step is to save and then export your design. JWildfire can use .obj files, so that's what I picked. It created a zip file that saved in my download folder, and then I unzipped it and moved the .obj file to my preferred folder. 

Next, I imported it into JWildfire using obj_mesh_wf. Click on the gear to select the object filename. If you see a plain cube, then it hasn't worked. (This object didn't load until I moved it into the folder that JWF was set to look for .obj files in). After I loaded it, I still didn't see anything. I needed to shrink the object, zoom out, change the angle, and make sure the color wasn't set to black. Now that I have the object loaded, I can use linear to make more copies of it, duplicate the transform, or add other transforms to create a scene.

Creating 360 Fractals for VR

I have been working on creating 360 panorama fractal pictures for viewing on Facebook and with a VR headset. First, I have to make sure that the size of the image is 2:1 (usually 8000x4000). For Facebook, I then have to change the metadata of the photo to be compatible with its automatic 360 viewer. For VR such as Oculus Rift, I just have to save in in the correct folder on the computer.

Next, I am trying to upload the picture to a website so that it can be viewed on Google Cardboard (which doesn't work with Facebook.) Here is a URL for the same picture, using the website vrEmbed:
http://vrembed.org/?src=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P6Vzff30qbs/WzGXP6XteGI/AAAAAAAACH0/G2WTnMa3QGYunptOMgDT3iqH4i0b-AHAwCLcBGAs/s1600/tmb3dcrossbisurf3.jpg&sphereParams=360,180,0,0&isStereo=false&plane=false

Links for Fractal Software

For anyone who had the chance to listen to my presentation on Fractal Art at the Austin Maker Faire today, here are some links to the software I use.
You can download the JWildfire software free from www.wildfire.org,
and download Mandelbulb3D from www.mandelbulb.com.

Fractal of the Day 5/3/2016

This fractal started with my quest to recreate a dragon shape that I made a few days ago, but didn't save the parameters for. The background was a surprisingly non-symmetric spherical3D fractal from JWildfire that I had previously added to my folder of backgrounds for MB3D. So even though it looks like the two were perfectly made for each other, it was more like a happy coincidence.