Spoonflower

The actual fabric! (rotated)

The design

Spoonflower inspired me to start designing fabrics that I could use to make Arm Pillozzz. Spoonflower is a neat site that allows you to upload images and tile them to create patterns. Then you can order them or just post them online so that other people can order them. You get 10% of any sales and you get a 10% discount on your own fabrics. Ordering a pattern on the basic cotton fabric is $17.50 per yard length (the rolls are 42" wide), so it's expensive compared to commercial fabrics. But you can make pretty much anything you want. It's like a zazzle/cafepress type site for fabric.  Most of my patterns are rigidly geometric, but I think I'm a pretty creative geometrist (Geometrician? Geometer? Whatever, I like geometry.) I think pattern design is math intensive considering that to effectively repeat a unit block, the boundaries of the block have to be consistent when repeated. Also, there are a lot of colors, and the way they interact and compliment each other is very interesting. Here's my first pattern!

Topology Meets Art

Topology and art definitely go hand in hand, though it may not seem obvious at first. Mathematical patterns underlie our universe, so it should be no surprise that they underlie our art as well. I found this awesome site with many unique abstract sculptures derived from areas of math including knot theory and surface geometry. The intricate abstract art below is a small sample from from Carlo H. Séquin.

Torus Knot 5-3

Poincaré Double Lace

Annual Eurographics Awards

Knot 7-7

Quad Rose

Scherk-Tower

Power Point Geometric Patterns

PowerPoint is a pretty awesome program in general, but I've recently been using it to make geometric patterns. There are tools for just about any shape you can think of, and layering shapes is a breeze. Below are a few examples of some patterns that I made.

Vyrus

Blobs

Squircle

Trap Ninja