Of scissors and paper

My December office project has been making paper snowflakes. We tape them up on the windows, door, cabinets--everywhere relevant. I even made icicles drip off the laundry sign. It's a beautiful thing.

Celtic knotwork and paper snowflakes, it seemed to me, would be particularly nice together. Therefore, for most of December, I've been trying to transfer the basic patterns. It's much harder than I supposed.

My first few attempts taught me the difference between paper and holes. It's not enough for the hole to be in the right place; in order for the paper to look like a thread, the hole has to have the right shape.

Then I discovered that the angles of the threads have to be continuous. They can and must curve, but if you have a "thread" heading down and at the fold it starts randomly angling back up like a mirrored beam of light, well, that sort of kills your design.

I made a few pretty and vaguely Celtic ones; or like a Gothic rose window, rather, one was. I also made one that looked like six aliens joined at the ears and holding hands.

My current problem is getting the pattern of threads to work out. I really thought I had it last night, and I was so excited. I even put these awesome hound-heads at the six points. But then I noticed that instead of having four intertwining threads, I actually had two pairs of parallel threads. Bummer, dude.

Today I've been working on straight pieces of paper, trying to get the pattern right. There was an odd one today that had two patterns going: the middles were like four exactly-offset sine waves, and the folds reverted to the pairs-of-parallel threads.

Geometry has never been one of my great skills. But I will make Celtic-knot snowflakes.