Week 27: Patterns in the Paper Weaving

I love fiber arts and weaving. So, I have one more weaving post for this series, but this time it’s with paper. This activity is great for all ages and can be done with ribbon, bias tape or strips of paper. I like to use origami paper strips.

The idea here is to play with repeating patterns and find where you can create secondary patterns, tessellations, and other shapes. Learners can experiment with over/under weavings and see what amazing patterns emerge. Make sure to have lots of colors, and encourage experimentation (diagonal, skipping, color patterns in warp and weft, gradients, etc.)

Math is beautiful. Math is playing with patterns and abstract thoughts. This is a wonderful activity to tickle the math parts of our brains.

Weavings above are done by my family and friends. My daughter and son really made a week of weaving papers.

Some questions to ponder:

• Can you create a matrix or array that can represent your pattern?
• For precalculus and above – what would operations on your matrices result in if you mapped colors to numbers?
• Can you create curves or other optical illusions with weaving techniques?
• How can weaving relate to our numbers? (number line, even/odd, etc.)
• Can you weave a function? What is the input and output?