Woolly thoughts can be wonderful

- and I can now hear some of you saying "Don't be ridiculous Cat!"

No, I am not being ridiculous. There are good "woolly thoughts" and I want to share a few with you. If you are not a member of the knitting world - and even if you are - you may not have heard of Pat Ashforth. Pat died a couple of days ago and the world of mathematics and knitting will be the poorer for it, much poorer.

I met her through a mutual friend in the knitting world. We exchanged emails spasmodically over the years.  Requests for information and advice flowed in both directions but her mathematical creativity reached heights I have no chance of achieving. For her it was a passion, for me it was more simply something of interest. I told her (more than once) I am not a mathematician...and she told me that everyone can learn to be a mathematician.

Pat was an amazing individual who, along with her husband Steve Plummer, introduced thousands upon thousands of children and teachers to an amazing world of knitted mathematical ideas. Their "Woolly Thoughts"   http://www.woollythoughts.com/ site is overflowing with the most amazing ideas.

 

These are three from the Woolly Thoughts website. (Pat once gave me permission to use the illustrations to tell others about  their work.)

The first of them is called "Curve of Pursuit", the second "Equal Parts"and the third "Pythagoras Tree".  They are just three of the quite extraordinary afghans or "mathghans" as they have sometimes been called. (Yes, there are patterns on the website and on Ravelry.") 

There are also patterns for games (dominoes, a draughts/checkboard, and ludo). Then there are patterns for manipulative games - a hexaflexagon and a Soma cube and more.   

The Senior Cat doesn't take a great deal of interest in knitting. (My lace knitting is referred to as "that stuff you make with holes in it"!) He was however interested in Pat's work. In his woodworking days he made timber versions of some of the items Pat knitted. He was making one of the puzzles one day when he came into me and asked, "Would it be possible to knit this?" I looked at it and said, "Yes." I sent the idea off to Pat and, some time later, an answer came, "Yes, of course. I'm actually working on that one."  So yes, there are pentacubes for pentominoes. Her version was much tidier and neater than mine. 

 One of the truly lovely things about Pat's designs is that many of them require quite small units of knitting. Our knitting group won't be able to meet this coming weekend but I hope our youngest members will be there next time because I was planning on showing them Pat's work and suggesting they make one of the simplest designs - the Borromean cubes based on Borromean rings. That way they can discover what can be done with three simple strips and they can learn about the need to knit evenly and measure accurately. Yes, they might learn a little maths in the process - and that won't hurt either.