Drum Geometry

When I was a kid my mom taught me to draw these little curved shapes using only straight lines.  I had lots of fun making all kinds of drawings.  I've come back to the idea several times as an adult; in 2012, I used the curved stitching approach to make a little mini-quilt for my mom, and in 2016 I made string art valentines.  

While recently exploring things I could make out of wood using the laser cutter I got excited by ways to make the wood pliable and easily curved.  The first time I really thought about this was when I made the wooden box for the Christmas nativity that had a flexible lid.  I started looking around and found a bunch of different patterns to make flexible wood cutouts. 

 My original idea was to have a round outer wooden frame, and then use the concepts from curved stitching (i.e. straight stitches to make curved shapes), but I didn't have any way to make the outer lattice work stay round.  It kept breaking (where the two segments joined together) and generally behaving badly, so I made a frame to hold it together.

Even with the frame, getting everything to be round and square was tricky.

Here it is after I started stitching my string pattern in the middle.  I decided to do five different sizes of string patterns, and though there are lots of different string patterns you can make, lots of them require anchor points on places other than the edge of the circle.  I used different colors of crochet thread, and It was time-consuming to do all the lacing, but luckily it went more smoothly than my other two wooden sculptures!

Drum Geometry, c. Shannon Conley, 2020

I like the way it turned out, I love the patterns generated with string, but overall the wood structure feels a little simplistic.  You can tell I'm not a sculptor!!

On the outside I stitched some of the non-circle string motifs.  These are the first I learned, but are drawn on an XY axis rather than circular backbone.