Moorish-styled Tiles

'Granada' range tiles, FiredEarth.com

I think these tiles are absolutely gorgeous. They’re based on classic Moorish tiling artwork from Spain. If you know the Alhambra in Granada (widely regarded a representing the pinnacle of Islamic geometrical art), you’ll know roughly what to expect (M.C Escher made a pilgrimage to the Alhambra to study its designs before embarking on his series of famous tesselated artworks, and some of the Alhambra's designs also seem to show up in the work of Roger Penrose).

The borders between the smaller protruding glazed shapes are recessed and unglazed, so that each tile looks as if it's been assembled from a mosaic of smaller and more complicated tile shapes. It's a nice surface.

The Granada range of tiles is made in Spain and sold by Fired Earth. They also do other North African and Middle Eastern designs without the mosaic effect, like the Andalucia and Anatolia ranges.

(Thanks to Mark at FiredEarth Brighton for providing background info and letting me take the photos)

Fibonacci Textiles

Fibonacci quilt (Louise Mabbs)

Today I popped along to an exhibition in Portslade, of quilts and textiles designed around the Fibonacci Series ("Fun With Fibonacci 2"), part of a larger display called Art in Creation 3 (19-21 May 2011).

The main exhibiting designer, Louise Mabbs, also creates fabric origami, and other mathematically inspired hybrid pieces.

A Koch Snowflake Sponge

Koch Snowflake Sponge

After the little triumph of the Koch Snowflake Solid, here's a better one: this beastie doesn't just give you the Koch Snowflake profile, it's also punctured by an infinite number of little Koch-snowflake-shaped copies, as holes.

It's a sponge!

The method's pretty much the same as before: divide your source cube into a 3×3×3 grid and delete the eight corners, but then also delete the central cubelet.
When you carry out the very first division it seems that deleting the centre shouldn't change the shape in any way, because the centre cube is totally isolated from the outside world by its six face-adjacent neighbours, but as the number of iterations increases, the cubelets get their corners progressively nibbled away and you get to peek through the holes created by the missing corners into the central void (and out of the other side).

At each iteration the sponge opens up a new set of hexagonal holes, and the existing holes open out and grow more Koch-Snowflakey detail.

This is a way cooler shape than the last one ("It's a sponge!").

And again, for the ultimate verification, I have a real one sitting on my desk made out of plastic.