Free Standing Lace Dodecahedron

My latest project is a tribute to Greek mathematics in free standing lace.  Last week, I showed my attempts to create a pentagon with the letter pi on it.   This week, I've made 12 of them, each with a different Greek letter with special significance in mathematics.  12 pentagons make a regular dodecahedron, one of the 5 Platonic solids.

I'm into color, so I decided to use color to introduce new symmetries.  I used a total of 6 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.  In each case, the web part of the lace is one color and the Greek letter and edge of the lace are a different color.  If you require the web and the edge to be one color apart on the color wheel, there are exactly 12 possible combinations and I used all of the exactly once.

Here's all 12 pentagons laid out in one possible configuration.

I required that at each edge of the dodecahedron, the pentagons that meet had to have different web and edge colors.  That drastically reduced the possible number of arrangements of the pentagons and made for a pleasing distribution of colors.

The pentagons are sewn together by hand with invisible thread.  That thread proved to be difficult to work with, but I got the job done.

I bought clips a while back for a different project, but this seemed like a perfect time to use them.

These aren't the fancy fabric clips, just paper clips from an office supply store.

Visualizing the finished product from a flat arrangement proved to be challenging.  Putting the whole thing together with the clips was very helpful.

I'm still not pleased with the finished product.  Unlike the cube, the edges aren't all that straight and the the whole thing has a somewhat lopsided appearance.  I'm working on creating a stiff framework for the pentagons.

Come back next week for a completely different project.