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The Chaka Stata

was an exercise in building an Incan rope bridge in as traditional a manner as possible. My classmates and I spent much of our Spring 2007 term twisting twine into two-ply cords and cords into thick ropes. Fortunately, the end result was beautiful and well worth it. It was also covered pretty thoroughly by the press. The MIT spotlight on it, with links to various articles about our bridge, can be seen here:  http://www.mit.edu/spotlight/inca-bridge/

The images here were taken by Christine Espino

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Knotted Origami

seems like just the thing that I should like – seeing as I clearly very much like origami and knots. For exhibit here is an origami cubeoctahedron out of business cards that has been wrapped by a strand of red cord. The cord wraps around several times with four strand braids occurring every time four strands overlay. The resulting shape outlined by a cord is tetrahedral. I made this on the plane to G4GX. While there, I also worked on making a business card tetrahedron wrapped with octahedral knotwork, which, unfortunately, seems to have been misplaced.

Is this the launch of a new era of hybrid origami knotwork? One can only hope. =)
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Partial Half Reverse French Braid**

plaited into my own hair this morning.

Inspired by a friend’s recent post on learning to french braid her hair, I decided to do something fancier than usual to my hair. This is probably one of the more complicated braids that I’ve ever tried to put into my own hair. The pinning is actually totally unnecessary for the hairstyle to stay, but I am hoping that adding it will prevent it from loosening over the course of the day. I took the photos just so that *I* could see what it looked like in the end, and figured I’d post them once I’d gone to that much trouble. I think it turned out ok, all things considered.

Things I learned:

  • reverse french braids are harder to put in your own hair than regular ones
  • even with a mirror it’s nearly impossible to see the back of your own head

** All terminology is pretty much made up by me. This site would probably call it a classic dutch lace braid (that starts off as a regular dutch braid). In my terminology partial~=classic, half=lace, and reverse french=dutch.