Making shirts from maths

Making shirts from maths, a photo by MadeleineS on Flickr.

In my “day job” I deal with mathematical publications and so there are proofs and running sheets galore that are destined for recycling. Being nice quality paper they make ideal paper for hand-stitched patchwork. This weekend I started cutting them up to make the second of out curvature shirts. In this picture you can see my cutting mat, the running sheets, the patchwork grid ruler, a plastic pentagon template, some cut papers and a neat little finger scalpel that’s kind to my arthritic knuckles.

The pentagons will be made up in yellow fabric and will form a part of a patchwork extension to a shirt, much like the one in the previous post. The yellow pentagons will replace the orange hexagons and the shape will change as a result. The final stage is to make a similar piece with red heptagons (7 sides, like a 50p piece) and you’ll see how this changes the shape again.

Last week we made great progress with the Klein bottle shirt. Julia came up with a smart way of connecting the parts of the shirt to get the right shape. With a combination of hand and machine sewing we got it almost finished. parts of the shirt have had wire inserted to hold it in shape. This one won’t be fully completed until we see just how it’s going to be displayed – just in case we need to unpick it and change some thing. No pictures just yet as we don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Next week we’ll make a start on the integrable systems shirt – in the meantime our spare hours hold lots and lots of hand cut and stitched patchwork!