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I was organizing our art closet and I came across a pile of curve stitching templates I printed out for my Arts Focus class, we did the project once but never again. I thought I would get one more use out of them, so I subjected my art playgroup kids to it. 🙂 They got pretty into it, although the patience level varied by age.
The moms had quite a good time too.
For actual instructions and the templates we used see Don’t Eat the Paste: Curve Stitching Templates. She has a nice description of the process and a bit of the history. Mary Boole created curve stitching to help teach mathematics, which led me to her entirely inadequate Wikipedia article (I bet if she had been a man it would have been longer!) which led me to her book, The Preparation of the Child for Science which I’m going to have to add to my summer reading list.
We also used this book, Curve Stitching: Art of Sewing Beautiful Mathematical Patterns
by Jon Millington, which is interesting, but it looks like it is about twice as expensive now as when I bought it a year and a half ago (for $16.50.)
Did you ever do anything like curve stitching when you were in elementary school? I know I did, but I can’t quite remember when. I do remember doing lots of doodling based on curve stitching when I was younger.
6 Comments
Add Yours →I have never done this, but it looks like fun! Maybe we will get to it this summer.
It was one of my favorite doodle topics in notebook edges, you can approach it strictly as a drawing exercise, or if you have one of those nail boards, as a string wrapping activity too.
I have never done that sort of things, but I think I am going to try to find a way to get my daughter to do it even now that she is 22mo . She probably can manage to understand that she has to match similar mini-pictures (instead of numbers). What do you think?
Sorry I fell into a black hole Fred. For your daughter I would suggest string or rubber band wrapping with a geoboard, that would be less fine-motor intensive, but let you talk about the shapes together. But I expect at that age that she would be more into the kinetics of the activity and much less into the observation or analysis. 🙂
Thanks for your reply Katherine 🙂 I will see if I get round to doing something like that with her. I found some other activities to develop her fine motor skills. She can now put a thick thread through a wooden bead.
Sorry I dropped off the planet for a while! There are so many fabulous simple things you can do at that age. That was when I got Rebecca sewing with needles.