John Burridge: zillij

Showing posts with label zillij. Show all posts

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Tiling Stars

Red stars, triangles, and kites arranged into nine-fold and six-fold arrays.

One of my hobbies is playing around with different types of tilings. Mostly I like to play around with Penrose Kites and Darts. I also like to try to fit stars into regular patterns. The most recent exploration that I've done comes from Daud Sutton's "Islamic Design," where he talks about making a grid out of right triangles, and then placing regular polygons and other shapes onto the edges and corners of the triangles. In the case that I was interested in, he used five-pointed stars.

Getting the stars down on the triangles was simple enough, but it took me a lot of wiggling to get the nine kite-shapes at the top and bottom of the design to look symmetric and not smooshed.

I'll have to see what sorts of patterns will result from right-triangles which form squares instead of hexagons.

A couple of weeks ago, I read about a technique for putting odd-numbered polygons and stars together. Start with a figure, duplicate and reflect it, then make the two closest points touch. Skip a point on ether side of the touching point, and place a reflected duplicate there, too. This will make a repeating line, which you can put together into a mesh. I tried it with 5-, 7-, and 9-stars; the 7-stars were the most aesthetic, so I put together some interwoven 7-stars into a larger interwoven pattern.

Whats fun about this technique is that it allows one to break away from patterns that are hexagon- or square-based.

Friday, November 27, 2020

Squares, Stars, and Icosagons

On the creative front, I've come up with some holiday patterns in InkScape to use as backgrounds for when I'm telecommuting to work or holiday events. I started with a square, then I duplicated them so I had five, then rotated them 72 degrees and grouped them into star patterns. The star groups are either pointed upward or downward.

Pentagonal designs tend to fall into two categories: five or ten rays radiating from a central point, or rings of alternating units.

The first design I came up with starts with a upward pointing star group; each of its five edges are joined with the edges of a downward pointing star group, which forms a ring around the center; each of the ten free edges on the downward pointing star groups are joined with an upward star, forming another ring, and the whole design keeps repeating that way. What's interesting to me is way almond-shaped gaps open up in the network of star groups.

For the second design I wanted more complete circles (actually bevelled decagons or icosagons). The decagons can only hold three star groups at most, with the result that a decagon can only overlap with at most only two other decagons. In addition to the almond-shaped gaps, packing the decagons together creates a boat- or T-shaped gap and also a star-shaped gap in the arrangement of star groups--I arranged star groups in a way that would favor the creation of complete decagons and star gaps.

The third design is the second one, only zoomed out a little. Since this is all done with pentagonal symmetry, the designs end up looking like zilij or Penrose tilings. I suppose I should go back into InkScape and change the colors; red and green are traditional for the winter holidays, but a number of people have commented that the contrasting hues make them dizzy.

Monday, March 30, 2020

Weekend Tile Wiggling

It's rainy, so we can't be outside in the yard. We're lucky that both of us can work from home and The Child can do "enrichment" tasks on-line.

On the gym front: Sunday I did a 30 minute power walk of the neighborhood (while listening to my Gym Mix), carefully maintaining social distance by walking on the other side of the street from everyone. There were a lot of folks out power walking.

Monday, I did some dumbbell work with the 8 lb dumbbells that I own. I wish I had 15 lb ones, because I have to do a lot of reps to feel like I'm doing anything at all. Aoife is not helpful at all for doing a home gym routine, as both Mark and I have discovered when trying to do anything approaching yoga or sit-ups.

I made this zellij pattern over the weekend, and it was relaxing to do so. I am going to see if I can use it as a Zoom background.

Sunday, February 09, 2020

Everything And The Kitchen Sink

The last week has been a quiet one; we've been a little under the weather here, with low activity levels.

Also, I had to replace the ten-year-old water faucet in our kitchen, which required multiple trips to multiple hardware store to scope out replacement parts, purchase a new faucet, and finally obtain a massive, three-foot-long water-valve key to turn the water off to our house. I seem to recall a lot of swearing. On the plus side: we can use the sink without a mini-jet of water coming out of faucet; and I now have a tool that will allow me to pose, Poseidon like, shirtless and with one foot resting on a writing mass of pipes, waterlines, and wrenches.

Mark continued to conduct quests to Delta Ponds in order to see beavers. The latest trip, early on Saturday morning (2/8), the water in the side-chanells was down, and there were no beavers to be seen. I guess without the extra foot or three of water gone, they were less inclined to corpuscular morning activity (or else they were exhausted from a previous evening's worth of cambium gnawing).

We did come across a nonchalant heron stalking fish.

On the craft front, I came across a star design set in an octagonal grid system, and riffed off of it. Stars, with their pentagonal symmetry, are tricky to work with, mostly because 60 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, and 72 degrees come together awkwardly in two dimensions.

What I've discovered is that pinching or opening the angle of the stars' points is a tremendous aid to cleaner designs when distributing stars around a regular polygon, like an octagon or a hexagon. Specifically, if you trim a 45 degree angle off of an octagon, duplicated the angle five times and rotate it 72 degrees into a star, the resulting stars will project octagon-friendly grids more readily than a regular star. Also, you can work with how the exterior and interior angles suggest zig-zags in lines for designs that look tangled on purpose instead of recursive snarls.

The star design on the left is using stars with points made with 45 degree angles, which makes for a more orthogonal design; the similar star design on the right uses points with 60 degrees, so hexagons look more regular.

Also on the craft front, I decorated an Altoids tin with a Valentine's design. At least, it was supposed to be suggestive of Valentine's. I was attempting to make two raptors, back-to-back, into a heart shape. I did this all by hand instead of using the plotter-cutter, and got (more or less) identical shapes by tracing hard over my original design over colored cardstock. I'm not sure if the heart shape is coming out or not; the end product has a pareidolia effect going. Mark looked at the finished product and said they looked like parrots. The background I chose gave the whole thing an Arts And Crafts feel, so I'm pleased about that.

On the writing front: going slowly, but I did manage to submit a short story. Yay.

On the gym front, I went last Monday for a Push-Pull Routine, which felt like running through molasses. I was fighting off some kind of stomach bug. I felt too run-down to go Wednesday. Because of Thursday's plumbing adventures, I had pulled something in my hands that left my left thumb particularly pained when I grasped things, so I wanted to give my hands a rest Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday.

Monday, January 20, 2020

More Wiggling Polygons

Lately, I've been wiggling shapes together to try to make interesting tessellations.

I have to say every time I make a foray into this sort of design, I have to stop an appreciate 500 year old tile artists who managed to work out these patterns without computer assisted drawing (although, they do fudge shapes away from strict geometric polygons).

What typically happens is that I start in on a design that clicks into place on a local level but once I start to extend the repeats out -- or try rotating the whole pattern 120 degrees instead of 90 -- there's a fractional repeat that starts adding additional recursive shapes.

Theoretically, one could get around the difficulties of using both squares and triangles by designing a pattern with twelve-fold symmetry).

Looking at books on design, it seems the best strategy is to arrange squares and triangles and stars along radial guidelines and then wait for patterns to snap (mostly) into place.

Five-fold symmetry, as I've noted before, is very hard to tessalate unless one folds the two-dimensions of the workspace into three dimensions. My intuition tells me that folding a pattern of ten stars into a regularly repeating pattern is somehow part of the same property of our universe that means you have to fold sound somehow if you want to make seven octaves and twelve fifths a unison.

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Designs

Dreams: I'm sure I've been having them, but I'm not recalling much of them.

Design: After laser cutting some white oak, which cuts more cleanly than birch plywood, I want to make tessellated tiles like this one. The difficulty is that it's difficult to come up with a design that is simultaneously clean and preserves all ten five pointed stars around the larger ten pointed ones. So far the only way I can think of to do it involves making a dodecahedron with each ten stars around an eleventh as one of the pentagonal faces.

On the health front, I've had a revelation. My joints don't hurt because I'm getting older or the humidity is changing. My joints hurt because I'm lifting weights at the gym.

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

Starry Stars!

Geometry makes me happy.

I suspect that it's soothing in a way that knitting is. In any case, I was fiddling around with InkScape, and discovered if you make a polygon, regular or otherwise, and turn the polygon object into a stroke, you can then turn the stroked polygon into guides. It is so much easier to line up other polygons at guide intersections than it is to have to fiddle them into place manually.

Right away, making patterns like this one became much more easier, and much more precise.

This is the sort of design I'd like to turn into a wooden panel or something and hang three together. Mark has forbidden me from turning the house into the Alhambra, so I guess I won't be filling the home's walls with these any time soon.

I'm not sure if this is a Persian rug design or the back of a playing card. I like this pattern because it is stars fitting together in a regularly pleasing way. And, purple! Also, the negative blue spaces are all the same shape, which is pretty darn cool. And if I unfocus my eyes, I can see all sorts of three-dimensional grids going on.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Geometry and the Book of Art

There are a lot of geometry figures in the Book of Art.

I like constructing geometric figures because it's calming; I suspect using the compass is similar to knitting in terms of neurological feedback. On one hand, the constructions are like little puzzles, which are stimulating; but on the other hand, they give me a sense of ordering things, which is calming. I find they're usually more calming, because if my brain is chattering at me at the end of the night and I can't sleep, about fifteen minutes drafting figures gets me into a more restful state of mind.

Hexagons from circles fascinate me because I have a strong feeling that putting them together illustrates the structure of the universe; drawing them gives me the same sensation as humming in a stairwell and discovering the harmonic frequency of the space.

Another favorite construction is ten five-pointed stars in a circle. This pattern shows up in zillij patterns a lot. I like it more than combinations of eight or twelve stars because the stars aren't distorted in order to fit.

Triangles and 2:1 circles are fun, too.

I've had this particular compass forever. I should get a travel case for it, because it gets a little banged up travelling lose in my shoulder bag (and occasionally the needle sticks me).

Thursday, January 01, 2015

Decade in Review: 2012

March 2012. Ursula K Le Guin came and spoke at the Eugene Library. It's always refreshing to hear her speak because she's clear and passionate.

April 2012. After a period where I was conducting tasseomancy, and Tweeting what the tea and milk swirling in my tea cup said, one of my friends commented that I was always taking a Rorschach Test. That's an apt metaphor for how I think.

This was the year that I started playing with Blender (again), a three-dimensional rendering engine, and InkScape, a graphic design program. In addition to creating a scarab on a 3D-printer and playing around with a Silhouette plotter-cutter, I continued to play with geometric designs and zellij, with the end result being a Café John logo.

I should explain that Café John is what I imagine our back yard could be like if I only had wait staff to bring me scones and tea. The idea is that I'm writing at a nice table, with linens, and a comfy chair, outside. Not only am I writing, but I'm a fabulous writer. With tea. The reality is that the snacks get cold, or the wasps want the cucumber sandwiches, or the neighbors start using a leaf-blower, or the sun becomes unbearably hot. And then I notice detritus around the yard that makes me mutter, "Great Moments in White Trash," and the illusion of glamour is broken. Which requires more tea, and probably some chocolate as well.

Part of the allure of Café John is that it would be nice if I could host a symposium on ancient archaeology as it impacts theories of NeoPaganism and modern constructs of shamanism, or Steampunk and Masculinity, or even a presentation of airship songs of the early 1900's, that would be so great. But somehow, instead of being Scheherazade hosting an erudite party, it's usually just me, trying to write or edit.

May - September 2012 Some friends formed a coven. Um. It didn't work out for me, and I dropped out. It was mostly a case of some people you can be friends with, and some people you can do ritual with, and they aren't always the same people.

But it was also...

If I'm Doing the Coven Thing, then I can't be writing (and I'm supposed to be doing the Writing Thing (and the Job Thing and the Parent Thing, and the Spouse Thing).
A growing sense that the everyone wanted to go to Place A (or possibly Places C, D, E and F), but I wanted to go to Place B.
The feeling that getting to Place Close-Enough-To-B-And-To-A would require more effort than I could give, and turn me into a nag in the process.... not to mention leave me unsatisfied that I'm not going to Actual-Place-B.
Which makes rituals feel forced.
Wanting to experience Numinous Moments within a Group Context, and worrying that it put an unrealistic burden on everyone.
Fretting that wanting to experience Numinous Moments was a kind of spiritual addiction.
The realization that maybe I'm in an Old Curmudgeon Mode, and while the concept of group spiritual practice seems nice, the reality may be that I'd rather do it alone.

November 2012. My short story, "Reset Romance," was chosen for publication by On the Premises. The premise was "Time." I'd written this story shortly after watching the reboot of Star Trek. I was annoyed by "red matter" and the resetting of timelines in the movie, and turned that into a story about a married, time traveling couple.

2012 was a utilitarian year, I guess. Looking back, it seemed like I was plugging along, writing, getting manuscript rejections, and designing graphic things when I wasn't writing. And failing to make a group Neo-Pagan practice work.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Decade in Review: 2011

January 2011: After some deliberations, I decided to write on a train from Eugene to Portland. So I dressed up as a Pegasus Ranger! The train ride was fun. I discovered the Crumpacker Family Library (The Temple of Books!) and I had a lovely pizza dinner with Jay Lake. The summary of my Adventures of a Pegasus Ranger follows:

In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone. As he recalls life, art and Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the Pegasus Ranger concludes that the Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy. But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well. Bring outfits. Look good.

February 2011: The grey days of Winter were officially getting to me. To combat them I would use a halogen torchiere and fill the house with Summer-like light. The Winter Light never used to bother me (that I'd been aware) and I attributed my sluggishness and despair to (undiagnosed) seasonal depression. But some days not eve the torchiere would help, and I'd have to take a picture of myself wearing a turban made out of a starry polar fleece blanket.

March 2011: We went skiing, where I had the pleasure of admiring a stranger's skiing moves, and discovered I was looking at Mark. Going home, we got trapped on the highway about twenty miles out of Eugene by a a windstorm which blew a tree over a road and knocked electricity out of the McKenzie River corridor. Mark drove us to Belnap Hotsprings and discovered a lovely outdoor temple folly. I was glad I was with him, because I would have pulled the car over at the side of the highway and froze.

April 2011: I officially began fiddling around with zellij tile design and launched a fascination with producing ten five-pointed stars whirling around each other. I'd already played with Penrose Tiles, so it was an easy jump. I find that constructing geometric forms calms me down and is rewarding; I'm not sure if it's the process, of using a compass or the pleasure of creating an ordered design, or the challenge of fitting different things together.

On the writing front, I tried to create an e-book and got stalled.

May 2011: After watching University of Oregon want ads for about a year and applying for a few jobs, a writer friend from the Wordos clued me in to an IT job opening in the UO Psychology Department. I got hired as a temporary part-time worker. This was a good thing; and the extra income made a lot of things a whole lot easier.

June 2011: We visited Mark's family on the east coast. It's always fun to visit them because they are New York Direct, which is a refreshing change from Corvallis Nice. We usually do some site-seeing, and I often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- this visit included a reminder to finish projects. One day, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Olana -- we dressed up, and got to be fabulous gays touring an architectural palace (with sketching and a picnic afterward).

September 2011: My micro fiction, "The Book Deal" was purchased for "Twisted Tales," a micro fiction anthology by Delving Press. "The Book Deal" was a fun, 66 word horror story. Alethea Kontis and Damon Kaswell were also in it.

Through the late summer and throughout autumn, I worked on writer craft. I read Dracula, and I couldn't understand what was so horrible about the vampire until someone explained to me at OryCon that the count was operating outside the circle of Christian Grace. I read some dreadful steampunk genre stories (one kept flipping back and forth between a romance and something else), and apparently zombies (er, revenants) must be included. I wrote my first steampunk story, and then another, to mixed reactions at the Wordos table.

And I thought about masculinity, and gay male desire, and story, and what is it that I want to explore as a man who is gay and who is a writer.

If there was a theme for 2011, it was the geometry of life cycles. I wanted things to be pretty and ordered, but it seems that having a pretty and ordered life takes a lot of practice -- and in the end, the geometry is left open by Death.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Virtual Stars and Labyrinths

One of the rewards I give myself is working with Blender to create 3D images. Lately, I've managed to use InkScape to create 2D patterns which I then import into Blender extrude into 3D shapes.

Importing from InkScape works fairly well with angular objects, but curved objects tend to generate objects with a broken manifold or with a missing facet that shows the insides of solid objects. When an object isn't manifold, I have to go in and edit objects on a vertex and face levels.

Blender can use Boolean Logic to create complex shapes by combining or subtracting simple objects. My favorite function is the difference function, followed by intersection function.

One of the latest designs I've worked on are a Moroccan tile design created by interweaving five pointed stars. Since the symmetry is pentagonal, the golden mean shows up frequently. Interweave designs require careful focus during the InkScape design process to get the over-under pattern correct.

The other design is a labyrinth. After looking at ancient and classical labyrinth mosaics, I worked on something similar. After following some false trails (heh), I found that creating a roughed-out design on paper was more efficient than trying to make paths work in InkScape.

I managed to create a labyrinth and get it into Blender. Then I extruded it into something a person could walk through. Or possibly a stove element.

Revisiting the labyrinth, I managed -- with a whole lot of difficulty -- to grab just the top vertices of the extruded labyrinth, then scale them down so that instead of a disk shape, I had a cone shape. From there, playing with a sphere gave me... Tron's lightcycle helmet, I think.

Oh well. I'm hoping that I can create some interesting objects by sending the Blender Items to Shapeways, a 3D printing company.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Blender Shadows

Hmm. This one is subtle. Maybe too subtle.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Zellij and Blender

Sometimes it's nice to take a break from reading and writing and play with virtual objects in 3D space.

I've wanted to create an interwoven pattern from this design for some time. I thought I was going to have an unmanifold object when I imported part of this design from Inkscape into Blender. When I rendered the design, some of the top faces were shadowy, as if there were missing sub-faces. I tried to fix some of the stray faces and vertices in the model, but gave up. Serendipitously, when I stretched my model out and then performed a Boolean difference with a flattened cube, the "jagged" edges of the model were smoothed out.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Rotating Zigzags Into Stars

The other day I came across a design that looked like it used only lines zig-zagging at right angles and I thought, "I could do that."

I made a mistake working from memory and forgot that I was supposed to be using a zig-zag and used squares instead. But eventually I got the source pattern in front of me and saw my misstep.

Why yes, you could cut this design out on paper and then fold it into a truncated icosahedron; why do you ask?

Saturday, April 26, 2014

More Zellij

Hey! Look... John's messing around with zellij. Again. He wants to make a tile in Blender then send it to Shapeways. No. Really.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Circles of Interwoven Stars

Here's a Blender rendering I did a while back. I keep coming across it, and yesterday I found a physical photograph of it which I put on my office door at work.

I hadn't realized it at the time, but it is the same geometry as the zellij tiles I've studied more recently. I like the patterns that have regular five-pointed stars in them. These are difficult to have come out right, because 72 degrees really only works well with other pentagon-based shapes, and then the golden mean rears its ugly head and everything starts to look like Penrose Tiles.

Which isn't a bad thing, actually...

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Papercraft in Review

I realized that I've done a lot of papercraft in the past year.

It all started with the stars. For about two years, I'd been working with arrangements of stars working from inspirations in Islamic tile design, or zellij. I had a notion that I'd be able to make zellij Christmas gifts out of dough with melted Life Savers. The prototype runs I made were not a success.

I forget exactly how I bumped into The Artists' Pallet, but they had a Silhouette cutter-plotter that would cut designs out of paper for me. I used InkScape to make a zellij design, cut it out, and glued the result into a cylinder. Voila! Instant votive lamps.

My Dad's birthday is in January, so it was an easy jump to make a birthday votive using a different design based on triskellions.

Arrangements of stars still continued to be an obsession. I'd used Blender and created some virtual 3D models of the stars and decagrams used in the Christmas votives and then rendered them into background screens.

Looking at them day after day, I started to fold them in my head and realized that I could probably fold a star mesh into various platonic solids. I started out with an octahedron, and managed to fold up a icosahedron.

Once I had a star globe, it was a moral imperative that I pose as a Burne-Jones painting.

My sister's birthday is in February. Julie likes fishing and she quilts. For my birthday, she'd made me a fish quilt (which I like very much). I thought she'd like a similar design, and I figured out a kind of light box with nested tessellating fish in it.

On to Mother's day! I returned to the cylinder design and filled a hot pink page with mostly cut-out butterflies. The design was hexagonal, which meant I could play games with alternating butterflies circling around common centers.

I put a smaller blue cylinder inside, which made things purple, and added a few butterflies from a second pink page.

We were having an Opera Themed Birthday party. I wanted to go as Orpheus, so I designed a laurel wreath to wear. I printed out six or so leaves which overlapped and then discovered that the ends of one leaf would slide through the cut-out veins of another set. I was able to roll the leaves into a extended spiral, lock them together, and then glue them in place.

There weren't too many opportunities for decorative paper arts until my Mom's birthday came around. I wanted make something that was kind of Japanese. Mark said that the result looked like either a Parcheesi board or else like a kind of Bauhaus-Edo thing. However, I'd managed to get the color scheme right, and Mom liked it.

At some point I decided that I really needed an Egyptian Eye of Horus for my new office. I wanted something like the Eye of God over Saint Teresa of Avila... at least I think that's the name of the sculpture. I could never quite find the photo I'd seen once on the internet or in an art book or something.

For Halloween, I'd been fiddling around with bats. I thought that it would be easy to map a circle of bats to a polygon, but then I realized that I'd made a clockwise circle... which meant that the design was chiral... which meant I had to really think about how I was going to put the bats together without getting them crossed instead of overlapping.

Since last Christmas had been so successful, I decided to do the Twelve Days of Christmas. The Partridge came out nicely, as well as some of the other birds, which lulled me into a false sense of security about working with the other designs. Which were hard. My biggest difficulty was getting carried away with microscopic details--some of which would work if I were using the whole 12 inch square paper, but which resulted in mangled sheets if I scaled them down too far.

My favorite non-bird design was the Twelve Drummer's drum.

Working on the Twelve Days became sort of like--well, like work. So to take a break from them, for fun I started to work with a reindeer design I had. I had a favorite paper punch which stopped working, so I used that as a base, fixed the horns, and then played with various leg placements. The result was a reindeer trifold.

These turned out to be more successful than the 12 days. Which was a good thing, because snow and ice pretty much shut down Eugene for a week, and I was only able to create enough of these because they were less involved to print than the Twelve Days.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

John Does the MET (Again)

Sunday night (Dec 22), Mark suggested that I go to the MET the next day. So I did.
The next day, I navigated the busses and the metro-line and got to the MET (after getting a little turned around and walking past the Guggenheim) around 10:15.

Visiting the MET is like visiting old friends, and I wish that I could go with Mark or someone, but it is nice to be able to just go into whatever gallery you wish. This time around I visited (surprise!) the Egyptian Gallery, Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, the Islamic wing, and the Ancient Near Eastern Wing.

Egyptian Wing

I took photos of my crown, and Queen Hatshepsut in the Egyptian Wing.

I took a moment to sketch a scarab. I wanted to see how the legs worked on this particular one (from a monument to Rameses), especially the middle legs. I got the thorax a little too long, but otherwise I thought my drawing worked.

For fun, I like to visit the artifact wings behind the main displays. The royal stuff is nice, but it's interesting to see how many common tools (and charms) there are and how the craftsmanship changes over the centuries. My favorite out-of-the-way artifact were the men presenting shrines--there was a nurturing masculine feel to some of them, and I appreciate the skill that went into carving manly arms.

The Temple of Dendura was a mob scene by 11AM, so I looked from a distance.

Medieval Wing

The Neapolitan Christmas Tree was up. I would have taken pictures of the spotlit angels, but I didn't have a tripod. I always have difficulties photographing things in the medieval wing because of the dim lighting, but I managed to get some Gospel Animals (the Bull and the Lion) and an over-the-top baptismal font. I also managed to get details on some angel wing feathers to study for future paper cut-out designs.

Next visit, I want to spend more time in the Medieval and Renaissance Wings; I like the miniatures and wish there were more artifacts that weren't a Madonna and Child or martyrdom -- I like the animalistic firedogs, faucets, candlesticks and door handles. I briefly visited the masterpiece locks and chests, and took a moment to appreciate the pocket sundials.

American Wing

I'd thought I might have a snack here, but the snack bar and the sculpture garden was mobbed, which reduced the appeal of both the snacks the statues.

I finally managed to get a good shot of the Tiffany tile work. What I like about this is how the tiles manage to make the a interweaving knot pattern with squares and circles. It looks like a film strip turning around on itself. The squares making up the edge artfully turn into wedges in order to let the filmstrips loop into circles.

I walked by the decorative arts and said hello to the Viking Punchbowl, the Silver Triton Boat, and the Bunnies! Fondu Pot. Near these was a trophy with a peacock-feathers-and-squares motif running along the top: I took a detail of this to study because I've always had difficulty designing peacock feathers. Some time when the museum is calmer, I'd like to come back and photograph more.

Islamic Art & Ancient Near East

In the Islamic Wing (new to me), I managed to see some Zellij work up close, which let me appreciate the intricate arabesque work within some of the tiles more. And there's something to be said also for being able to see larger works from far away (some really do work a lot better far away than up close). Garish large tiles up close blend to something pleasant when far away. While I enjoyed the knot-works very much, my favorite display was a receiving room which had many designs done with mostly square tiles -- many variations using eight- and twelve-fold symmetry.

I found another crown, which I would wear in a New York Second. I particularly like the dangling pendant work.

The Islamic Wing is next to the Ancient Near East Wing, so I visited The Elamite Cow and the Sun Cart and other artifacts from Anatolia. Once again I got blurry photos of the Assyrian Guardian.

On the down side, Christmas week is not exactly the best time to visit the MET and have the galleries to yourself. The main hall filled up quickly, and the shopping was a bit frantic. I got some gifts for others and three books for myself: one on the Unicorn Tapestry, one on Islamic Design and Culture, and one on the Jewels of the Romanovs. The first two the Eugene Library has, and I wanted my own copy. The last one reminded me of Mark, and I got it with him in mind.

I thought about hanging out until the museum closed, but I had pretty much filled up my camera and I did't want to go through the subway system and Port Authority Bus Terminal in the Five O'clock Hour, so I left shortly after four. My travel kung-fu was at an ebb this visit; not only did I get turned around and wind up at the Guggenheim coming in, I missed the closer subway entrance on Lexington, and ended up walking a little farther than I wanted. But still, I managed to haul my catch successfully to the the Port Authority Bus Terminal and eventually to Suffern.

More photos are here: https://plus.google.com/photos/104081709962934753879/albums/5960798179917170241?authkey=CN-zk-zShYDZBQ