PLIX Beautiful Symmetry beta-testing: reflections from the process

[hardingn]

Just watch out with food allergies and religious situations. I learned using marshmallows (and other products made of gelatin) in an engineering program that they are forbidden by some religions. When running programs for patterns and symmetry, we use counting bears like these these for young children

and pony beads (to make bracelets) for older children.

[binka]

Thanks for mentioning that, Nicole! We found some good rice crackers that came in red and black but not from the place we had to order all our symmetry snacks. I think that the Annie’s bunny gummies are gelatin-free and gluten free too, fwiw.

[Tracy]

This week I continued thinking about symmetrical patterns on fabric, and I decided to use my potato stamp along with some leftover screen printing supplies I have at my library to print onto a cloth book bag.

From my BeauSym kit, I used the potato and the rectangular cookie cutters to carve the stamps.

Then I cut a piece of screen printing mesh and used an embroidery hoop as my frame.

Then I dipped my potato stamps in Mod Podge and stamped a somewhat-symmetrical pattern on my screen.

Once that dried, I used my trusty library card to squeegee some ink through my screen.

Here’s what the screen looked like after the first printing with blue ink.

Here’s my finished book bag after I printed with a couple more colors to make it more visually interesting. I think I’ll add some more overlapping prints in even more colors.

[Lydia]

Blayne, just popping in to say I love this use of desk time .

[sami.kerzel]

Played around a little bit yesterday, and this is what happened…
Symmetrical painting, plus a little bit of shape play and butterfly finding:

This was just some of the excess paint, that turned out more beautiful than the intentional work:

Played around with some paper. Including creating radial paper relief sculptures:

Followed up with some rotational symmetry, layering and paper cutting:

More playing… rotational art:

Tessellations:

Symmetrical Alphabet (except for a few that don’t play along well):

Sorry for the brain dump! This was tons of fun. I found my brain struggled the most with the rotational symmetry in relation to the circles/pie wedges. Definitely intrigued the most by the paper relief sculptures.

[binka]

Clever way to build stamps from LEGO bricks (which themselves have repeated patterns)

LEGO Stamping: It's Art with Bricks! - Frugal Fun For Boys and Girls

[averymsnormandin]

Today’s sketchbook experiments from Open Hours!

1. washi tape “wallpaper:”

2. Symmetry collage-remixes from magazine cutouts:

[binka]

Hey Tracy! I attempted to do the thing I was thinking about, inspired by your idea of silkscreening with embroidery hoops, but with the snowflakes and no glue, and it worked out pretty well. I am guessing it’d’ve been more successful had I used real silkscreen material and less liquid paint (I used some tempera I had on hand).

Step 1: Cut a stencil out of a plastic mailing envelope (may work better with tracing paper or something less slick)

Step 2: Lay the cut design onto the printing surface. Place the dry silkscreen over it.

Step 3: Apply paint directly to the surface of the screen and spread with a squeegee (many libraries use leftover cards with great success!)

Step 4: The first pass may not go well! Neither may the second. (Yellow: not enough paint went through the screen, and in the middle green one, the stencil leaked a bit—maybe I made too many passes?) Try try again.

Step 5: Eventually you’ll get the hang of pulling prints!

Step 6: Be sure to wash out the fabric if you want to try using it again. Here’s what the stencil looks like under the screen. It wasn’t a perfect seal (as seen in the green print) but it does have minimal steps and materials required.

by the way, my design and colors made me hungry for PIZZA

[binka]

Avery these are beautiful collages!

[Dave]

I discovered this nonfiction book (“Shapes in Math, Science, and Nature”) in the children’s collection at my library today that has a cool tinkering activity with tiles and symmetrical patterns. I’d like to create a few of these parquet games and have them be available in the children’s makerspace.

I quickly made a digital version of the parquet game arranging 16 photos in the Pages word processor app on MacOS because it has an easy rotation control.

BeauSym Example

I then took a screen shot of a pattern I made and converted it from a .png file to a .svg so that I could import it to Tinkercad. (I’ve used this free file converter site before: Online SVG image converter)
It’s pretty amazing how quickly a simple design can become so complex:

Here is a short video of the two .svg files I imported to Tinkercad. Both files are taken from the middle design in the photo above. One svg for the patterns in black and one for the purple patterns.

BeauSym svg Tinkercad

*Update:
I designed tiles and a tray using Tinkercad. The tray took way too long to print in two parts so I redesigned it to print in 5 parts plus inserts.

Update #2:
I finally finished printing the tiles and tray!

Here is a link to the .stl files in case anyone wishes to print them! (The inserts that hold the tray together should be printed slightly smaller than the original scale: probably around 99.6 - 99.8% scale.)

[Chris_Dorman]

I have ALWAYS loved these but never knew their names, Muqarnas! I think this would be a great activity for older students. Esp. if you discuss rotation from Berke’s book as a front load.

A Practical Introduction to Muqarnas

[janeflem]

I wanted to play around stamping and investigate flips, slides, and turns, so took two different shapes and two different colors and started flipping, sliding and turning and overlapping, and this is what I ended up with. It isn’t completely symmetrical, but I kind of like the way it turned out.

Earlier I was thinking about spider webs and I wanted to do more with that idea, so I started drawing and ended up with a starburst. I like it so much that I’m going to keep it and play with it a little more, to see what else I can turn it into.

[rygreene]

Hey there – I’m LOVING getting to see all the awesome symstuff you all are exploring

Here are just two more things I was tinkering with last week.

First, I used Piskel (a free online animator focused on pixel-based art) to play around with ways to visualize rotational symmetry and then overlap those visualizations. I made a simple rectangular pattern with 50% transparency and ran it through a series of four 90-degree rotations. Then I made a separate rectangular pattern and ran it through a series of four 90-degree rotations in the oposite direction. Then I alternated having only one pattern visible and having the two patterns overlapping. Here is the lil gif that emerged! We’ve just started facilitating and digital art program incorporating free online editors (including Piskel) so I’m hoping we’ll be able to incorporate some BeauSym stuff into it soon!

Second, I made a little flexagon to think about more tactile ways for kids to cycle through symmetrical patterns. I also like that it requires very few materials to make! Here’s a short youtube tutorial on how to fold this type of flexagon.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the debrief tomorrow

Ryan

[bborden]

Here is a roller I made from the reels leftover from our receipt printers. I added some adhesive shapes and then rolled it in paint to make designs on the paper.

I used cardstock as the paper so I cut out a bookmark and added some yarn for the tassel.

To make the roller I put some glue dots inside and put a library pencil through to be the roller handles. It works reasonably well and would be a way to make lots of rollers quickly and cheaply.

[bborden]

That flexagon looks so fun!!

[Francesca]

Here’s my Josef Albers inspired typography experiment I created in Canva (btw color theory was my favorite class when I was in college):

I could make these all day, pretty sure they would work as animations (also a Canva feature) too.

[sami.kerzel]

Here is the site that shows a handful of helpful folds for the Radial Paper Relief Sculpture: Radial Paper Relief Sculptures (4th/5th) | Art with Mrs. Nguyen

[Dave]

I dove into the Beautiful Symmetry book yesterday and did some coloring. This example is from page 21:

This week I am working on a Scratch project and I also discovered some cool how-to videos on making tessellations. (I googled “tessellation” after reading Berke’s book).

How to make a Tessellation - step by step tutorial

[rygreene]

Just wanted to share a cool little symmetry inspired creation from a soon-to-be-fifth-grader in one of our digital art classes today … she made this animation in Piskel using some of the built in symmetry tools! Yay

[averymsnormandin]

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing!