Following on from our maths/knitting post earlier this month, we’ve found a knitting blog full of knitted MC Escher designs. The famously mathematical graphic artist MC Escher was king of tessellating designs with repeated fish, birds and other animals.
Jana, who writes the blog in question, has taken on the formidable challenge of writing knitting patterns for a variety of different Escher designs and not without a deal of success. The designs are all hand-knitted and are ridiculously intricate: while some are made from separate shapes stitched together, there are some which are knit in rows with two colours, using a pattern of her own design. Much maths and knitting respect is due.
All posts on her site tagged with ‘Escher’ can be found here; particularly noteworthy are a blanket with a fish design, and some beautiful cushions.
(via Rudy Rucker and Edmund Harris on Twitter)
That’s a coincidence. Two days ago I decided to make a hyperbolic tessellation in the style of Escher:
http://cp4space.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/imitating-escher/
It occurs to me that you could combine Escher knitting with hyperbolic crochet to realise these tessellations without the area distortion found in the Poincare disc model.
You might find Woolly Thoughts web site an interesting visit.
Good points to start:
http://www.woollythoughts.com/aboutus.html
http://www.woollythoughts.com/afghans.html
Readers who are Ravelry users can find both Jana’s and Steve Plummer’s (Woolly Thoughts) work alonsgside other Escher-inspired knits here:
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/search#sort=best&craft=knitting&query=escher
I would like to see this knitting blog, but it appears to be invitation-only now ):
Also I’d like to see the hyperbolic imitation of Escher posted by Adam P. Goucher, but this link does not work either (although the rest of his blog seems to work, so it’s strange). (I am doing a kind of hyperbolic imitation of Escher myself — see http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/gallery.php )