What is it?

Curve stitching, also known as ‘string art’, is the threading or looping
round of threads from different points to create abstract geometric patterns.

History

It was invented by mathematician Mary Everest Boole at the end of the
nineteenth century. She encouraged children to explore maths through playful
activities such as curve stitching.

It became very popular in the 1960’s as a decorative art (i.e. stringy pictures
in homes).

Unlikely fact

Mount Everest was named after Mary’s Uncle George in 1865.

What to do

“No longer fashionable, so for anyone not familiar with the idea, it involves constructing two perpendicular axes with scales from, say 1 to 9, and then joining up the pairs of points on the axes that total to ten. I remembered forcing a bodkin threaded with thick yellow wool through fibrous unbleached board. As more pairs got joined a little bit of mathematical magic happened: the straight lines combined to reveal a curve.

Curve stitching probably isn’t taught much now as it lacks immediate
application and doesn’t appear on international tests. A shame since I think it
pinned down some important impressions for me. First, it introduced me to the
world of mathematics beyond arithmetic and showed me the beauty in that world.
Second, when, years later, I met calculus and differentiation, the traces in my
body from, literally, stitching a curve out of straight lines, gave me the physical grounding of the meaning of tangents to curves.”

Mike Askew: Transforming Primary Maths Blog

We started with coloured lines on paper, a right angle, and then adding more axes to create really funky designs. Then we looked at things around us, and though how we might curve stitch those. We tried a chair from the skip, an old hoop, picture frames, pillars in the gallery. The world’s your oyster!

Where’s the maths?

Using x and y axes

Plotting co-ordinates

Measuring and scales

Predicting

Useful links:

Nrich.maths.org/5366

http://playingwithmathematica.com/2011/04/27/curve-stitching-with-mathematica/

http://www.montessoriworld.org/Handwork/stitch/stitch1.html

http://www.mikeaskew.net/page7/files/Curve%20stitch.html