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This was written in
2007
so is now very dated
Chapters |
There are three elements to this story. Knitting and Mathematics are two and, in case you’ve forgotten, we were also travelling the Super-
Back in the days when we were writing Woolly Thoughts we had invested in very expensive, industry-
It took quite a long time to decide on the format of the instruction booklet. They had to be patterns that any knitter, or beginner, could follow, without the shorthand used in most patterns. We felt that knitters should know what they were doing, what they should expect to see and why they were doing it in an unfamiliar way. We had never written instructions as specific as these before. It was a little alien to our normal way but it was ‘what the customer wanted’. We were still mathematicians first and knitters second so every booklet had to have some explanation of the maths behind the design. We also thought it was essential to have a sheet in the centre with the outlines of the finished hanging. This could be photocopied as often as required and the knitter could experiment with their own colours. Somewhat surprisingly, these sheets were also in demand by teachers who wanted to use the patterns and they later became a loose-
Once the format was established it was relatively easy to adapt as each new idea came along though it took a while to catch up the backlog of all the designs that had gone before. All booklets refer to ‘afghan or wall-
Our basic rule for adding triangles on the side of squares was based on Pythagoras Theorem so the time arrived when we thought we should make a more overt attempt to show the theorem as people expect to see it: ‘The square on the hypotenuse …….’ It had to be more visually interesting than one triangle with a square attached to each side but we were limited in what we could do because we were still using the same angles as before and it didn’t give us many options. We drew what we decided was the only practical possibility and got yet another shock.
It started with one large square at the bottom with a triangle on top. Then a square was added to each of the free sides of these triangles. We intended to continue in this way until we arrived at a design we liked. To our amazement, as the squares and triangles swept round, two squares came together at the top to meet perfectly. Of course we should have known this would happen. It was an underlying property of so many other designs, relying on halving and doubling, but we just hadn’t realised what would happen when the process was stripped to its bare bones.
Although Pythagoras was a Greek, many people take this to be an Egyptian design. We named it Pythagoras Tree but, due to the colouring and the way it curves round, it is reminiscent of an Egyptian collar. It is strange that this design, which was so fundamental to much of our work, should prove to be the start of a series of events that pushed us onto another unexpected road. We followed the road that opened in front of us, little knowing what was about to happen.
12a. ART OR SCIENCE?