Crafts are more than an art; they often involve a great deal of math. Below a variety of craft projects that involve math are introduced.

Objective:

Students will come to understand and appreciate the role of math in various crafts. Target audience = math students.

A. Quilting

A great deal of math is used in quilting. Try these activites to get students thinking more about the math skills that are used in creating a quilt:

Create a quilt square: Geometry is an important component of the creation of individual quilt squares. Given a set of shapes (triangles of various sizes and rectangles/squares of various sizes) have the students see how many different quilt squares they can create. What will they call each square they've created? Have they created any items that resemble actual quilt square patterns? This activity involves problem solving and creative thinking.

Quilting-Questions: Create a set of story problems that require students to use math skills to determine the size of various quilts and quilt squares. For example, If you wanted a quilt that was 6 feet long by 4 feet wide with 24 squares, how big would each square have to be? Or if you created 10 squares that were 10 inches by 10 inches, what would the dimension of your final quilt be (there are many different configurations)? What if you used 25 squares of the same size?

B. Cross stitch

Cross stitch provides an excellent opportunity to discuss scaling. Have students try scaling down a large cross-stitch pattern to a smaller size or vice-versa using graphing paper. Several cross stitch patterns can be found on the web.