Origami Colibri Hummingbird

As we all know, first anniversaries are traditionally meant to be gifted with paper. So, back in 2010 for our first anniversary I spent hours and hours perfecting the skill of folding a Colibri Hummingbird from paper for David. Three years on, here’s the little fella standing proudly on my clothes horse!

Although it’s Ruby-throated rather than Colibri, here is one of my own video clips of a hummingbird feeding in Texas from our holiday in 2011…

Hama bead projects from university

This is the first of two Hama bead related posts that were inspired by my beading last night. You’ll understand why the champagne bottle jogged my memory of crafting with these beads when I publish the other post but for now I shall stick with the conventional use of Hama beads.

I own a huge number of Hama beads and associated materials because I love to use them with the Brownies. It’s a little fiddly but well worth all the effort. I have various peg boards that you load with the plastic beads before melting them into solid, flat structures with an ordinary iron and special paper that is a bit like baking parchment.

I created all of the these during my time at university whilst I was Brown Owl of the wonderful 38th Cambridge Brownies many years ago. I followed a pattern for the swans but the Brownie emblem and the Bagpuss are my designs.

 

All three of the above creations are packed away and never normally see the light of day but David and I still have the coasters below out for use in the lounge. They must be about ten years old now and are still going strong.

Beaded Champagne Bottle

I have made my first beaded creation on wire this evening. It’s an easy piece to make using 117 beads (115 in the pattern but I had to add a couple extra because my green ones are slightly too small). As with all crafting endeavours, I’m sure that I will improve with practice and hopefully future edges will be perfectly aligned but this is not a bad first attempt.

Here it is alongside the pattern used…

The champagne bottle design comes from one of my Christmas presents, which was selected from my amazon wish list. I can’t imagine that I will use any of the very simple designs from this book but some of the more complicated ones are beautiful. Click on the image to link to amazon and read some reviews or purchase the book for yourself.

Math Craft

I did mention this website back in July but it’s so brilliant that I’m flagging it up again, especially as I am now officially a contributor to the site. I decided to share the Sierpinski Christmas tree with even more people! Click on the screenshot to go and take a look at the site for yourself. It’s well worth a visit and is packed full of tutorials and simple “inspiration” articles like mine. It’s amazing the time and effort that people put into some of these pieces.

Book Review - Project Origami, Thomas Hull

Although there is a second edition of this book out at the end of this month (click here for details) I only just got this one for Christmas. It’s brilliant. Mind you, it is very definitely another one of those books that will appeal to the few of us who really are passionate about both Mathematics and crafting.

 

This book consists of 22 activities to inspire mathematical discovery in the classroom through origami. They range from “folding equilateral triangles in a square” to “rigid folds – Gaussian curvature and spherical trigonometry”. The worksheets and solutions are carefully produced and, at least at first glance, appear to be very useable while the pedagogy and extension sections are really interesting.

 

Although the material is primarily aimed at higher education Mathematics courses such as topology, number theory, calculus and graph theory, many of the activities can be adapted to suit high school Mathematics too. It will just take a bit of creativity, flexibility and plenty of enthusiasm to see them through.

 

Once they have constructed the net of a truncated icosahedron (football), I have often challenged my key stage 4 classes to colour the net so that no two faces of the same colour touch before cutting and folding the net into the 3-dimensional shape. This book has given me some further ideas on this topic and next week I’m going to attempt to introduce my Year 10s to the concept of planar graphs allowing them to demonstrate that four colours are sufficient to colour the ball without like-coloured faces touching.

 

Imagine putting a football (which is made up of 20 hexagons and 17 pentagons) onto the table, stretching the bottom face out and pushing the rest of the ball down flat onto the table so that none of the edges cross. This creates the following planar graph of a truncated icosahedron:

Note that this representation only shows 31 faces as the 32nd shape (the final pentagon) is stretched out underneath all of the others. This new 2-dimensional representation of a football clearly shows which faces touch each other, making the colouring problem significantly easier to tackle. It is easy enough to show that three colours are not sufficient so all they need to do is to colour the diagram with four colours so that no two adjacent shapes are the same colour and the outer hexagons are coloured using only three colours (so that the hidden pentagon can be coloured in the fourth colour). This is a simple exercise that they will have no problems with. It can then be extended to a 3-edge-colouring problem, which is even more interesting!

 

That’s why I keep asking for these kinds of books. They give me so much inspiration and help me to steer clear of hum drum textbook learning once in a while. I know it’s a niche market but while they keep publishing this kind of material I will keep buying it. Sorry David, my quirky library is ever expanding.