Geometry Turns to Nature

Well, ok, perhaps a bit of a stretch, that.

In seed beading, it's really easy and natural to make an equilateral triangle. The proportions of the sizes of the beads to the rate of change of stacked increases (three every round) just leads there easily: a nice, flat triangle. To be fair, if the triangle gets beyond a certain size (and not a very big size), it begins to buckle.

Hexagons work pretty well too, in terms of flat. Increase six stitches every third round.

Squares and rectangles, not so much. The increases are a bit odd. The edges ruffle. If you're making a narrow square or rectangular donut you can often get away with four increases per round, but as soon as you have too much surface area, the square becomes three-dimensional.

As does a pentagon, only more so, as you can imagine.

I had a thought about a folded pentagon last week, but the fold was ugly and almost lewd. A little grotesque. I cut it up.

A few days later I saw a better way to fold a beaded pentagon, which lead to little ideas in terms of colour placement and edge detailing, and so it turns out that if you fold a perfectly wavery pentagon you get something that's a somewhat stylized butterfly.

Or perhaps an orchid.

From another planet.

Who knew?