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The idea for this crochet design came from The Monty Hall Problem & Other Puzzles from Ivan Moscovich’s Mastermind Collection.  It is a visualisation problem, representing a combination lock. The eight rings have to be rotated until a cross is formed in a single colour. It is very difficult to do this in your head. You are not told which colour forms a cross, the angle between the arms of the cross, or given any other clues. We included drawings of the rings, in the pattern, so that people could cut them out and turn them to see the solution. (We also gave them a drawing of the solution.)

It could probably have been knitted but we opted for crochet.

There are 24 wedges so it is really a 24-sided shape but, once the border is added, it looks like a circle. There are six colours plus the centre and border colour. Working in rounds would have been difficult as it would have meant having several balls of yarn attached because the colours often occur more than once in a round.  We plumped for making it in wedges. It was difficult to plan the wedges so that they would give a reasonable overall size after splitting them for the eight rings. It is worked entirely in trebles (UK terminology), using only one yarn at a time.

Once the size was determined the next challenge was how to join the wedges as it went along. It took a lot of experimenting to get a satisfactory result. There are places where the same colour is used in adjacent wedges and, in these cases, two or more sections, were worked together.

KEY RINGS