Victor Vasarely was an artist in the mid 1900s with some interesting ideas on language, geometry and design patterns. I first saw his work on permenant display in Palm Springs, then later the Vancouver Art Gallery hosted a special exhibit. I found it captivating.
Two works by Vasarely. Left: Zebras, 1965. Right: Zett-Kek, 1966, on display in Palm Springs
The Greater Toronto Area has a boatload of people and very very few nearby rock climbing areas. So when a few local climbers developed The Turtle, a new crag on private land, there was certain to be heavy use and a high risk of a pissed-off land owner closing the crag. Developer Gus Alexandropoulos thought a couple signs around the crag would do nicely to encourage good behavior, so in the name of good crag karma I offered to make them.
A tiling a pattern of one or more geometric shapes that can be repeated to cover completely an arbitrariliy large 2D area. There are all sorts of set of shapes that can be periodically tiled - they can be quite beautiful and mathematically interesting.
A Penrose tiling, using two different quadrilaterals
There’s an active community of both serious mathematicians and regular laypeople that try to discover new and interesting tilings. You start with a constraint, say your set contains a square and a hexagon, and you try to work out what different patterns can be generated from that set. OK what if instead of squares you have rectangles? And what if the hexagon doesn’t have to be convex? And are you sure you’ve found all the tilings that come from that set? Can you prove it? And so on and so forth - it’s an endless treasure hunt. One hunting ground that has produced really cool patterns is that of pentagons. The wikipedia page on pentagonal tiling is a whopping 3500 words and has all sorts of strange and unexpected patterns. Poking around on this page led me to [this paper](/Hirshorn paper.pdf) that found all equilateral convex pentagons that tile the plane. As a little bonus, they discovered one really interesting pentagon, with 5 equal sides of equal lengths and angles of 60, 160, 80, 100, and 140 degrees, that can be used to produce at least two different tilings with a beautiful rotational symmetry. They dubbed it the ‘versatile.’ Rimshot.
Finished picture first
My friend Eric brought a nice Fiskar hatchet on a canoe trip. It’s a beautiful tool, but it has a monstrously ugly plastic sheath, so I offered to make him a new one.
Placeholder axe-head
Eric unfortunately lives in Deep River, so I didn’t have access to the hatchet. I had him take some dimensions then roughed out a 1:1 model in a block of wood. Whenever you’re doing 3D leatherwork it’s very very helpful to have forms to work around.
This was my largest project to date. My cousin requested a lined shoulder bag but was looking for something larger than the messenger bag I made for my sister. Starting from scratch is a difficult thing - most of my other projects are closely based off of existing designs if not direct ripoffs. A good starting point came from watching the movie Marathon Man, where the love interest has a very nice bag that seemed to meet my cousin’s needs.
Is it safe?
This project was my first bag. I had wanted to scale up to larger projects for a while, but the increased complexity and size intimidated me a little. The solution was to follow a pattern, specifically this Nigel Armitage messenger bag how to on Youtube. If you Paypal him $10 he’ll reply with a design document that takes a lot of the stress of your back. I was happy to do so and pleasantly surprised with the result.
The simplest and most popular design I’ve made so far is my little card holder wallet.
The cardholders fit 2-3 cards in each of the two slots and bills in the main body. It is made from four simple pieces and is totally planar, so construction is a breeze. And best of all it’s small and thin enough for someone with larger-than-normal legs like myself to comfortably slip into a front pocket.