Tag: Crafts

A while ago I tried to start a blog about games and puzzles, which failed, mainly due to time constraints.
I will recycle some of the posts here.

Here are a few crafts of varying difficulty that you can do just with card stock and scissors. The idea is always the same: Use several copies of a simple shape with slits to build paper sculptures. They all make nice holiday ornaments.

Triangles

The simplest such shape is an equilateral triangle that has been slit as shown below.

Using four such triangles, you can build the following star.

With eight triangles and a bit more patience, you get the following shape, which is Kepler’s Stella Octangula, a stellation of the octahedron, or the compound of two tetrahedra.

I like to curl the tips of the triangles to make them look like flower petals.

You can of course also build other objects.

Pentagonal Stars

Using 12 copies of the slit pentagrams below, one can build Kepler’s Small Stellated Dodecahedron.

This requires a bit patience. Start with one pentagram, and insert five pentagrams successively in all of its slits, thereby also linking the inserted pentagrams together as well. Then insert another five pentagrams into neighboring pairs of the first ring of pentagrams, again linking the pentagrams from the new ring together. Finally, insert the twelfth pentagram into the free slits of the pentagrams from the second ring.

The last steps require some heavy bending of the pentagrams, and careful adjustment at the end.

Triangles and Squares

Using properly slit triangles and squares, one can build a stellation of the cuboctahedron.

The slits in the squares and triangles must have the same length.

This is a bit easier than the previous example. During assembly, the model falls easily apart, but it is quite sturdy when done.

Irregular Hexagons

Twenty of the regular hexagons below can be used to create one of the stellations of the Icosahedron, the Small Triambic Icosahedron.

Escher’s Solid

This is the first stellation of the rhombic dodecahedron, also called Escher’s Solid. It tiles space. You need 12 of the non-convex hexagons below.

A simpler version is a stellation of a rhomboid, using 6 hexagons.

Final Comments

The strategy to design these models is to look for regular polyhedral shapes with few kinds of faces that intersect in a relatively simple way. Then, each intersection of two faces leads to slits on both faces half way along the intersection, so that the two faces can be slid into each other.

There are of course limits to this, but I am sure there are many more models one can assemble.