I've been playing with wrapping quilt fabric around batting scraps, and weaving them into baskets. Just in time for the holidays, I made a couple of black holes this way, including one for this guy:
I was inspired by a talk at Cal Tech last month by Kip Thorne, who won a Nobel Prize in 2017 for creating LIGO, the project that detected gravitational waves emanating from colliding black holes. (My DH works on this project.)
Instead of resting on his laurels, Kip has been having a blast producing black hole art, including movies (Interstellar, and soon, a sequel); and a massive poetry/art book with fine artist Lia Halloran. It's titled "The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves." Halloran illustrates the elusive concepts with elegant brush paintings, and paints her wife into many of the phenomena. (You can watch the talk I attended here.)
This gave me the courage to go for it, using black-and-gold fabrics from my stash, wrapped around 1" batting scraps. Here's my grandbaby's, looking straight in:
Here's the entire playset.
The space entities are fused and zig-zagged to black felt. The green thing is a former parachutist, now an exceptionally brave, strong, dumb, lucky, and immortal astronaut. He dives into the black hole:
i bet Father Christmas didn't bring many children a black hole for Christmas! Perhaps you are training a budding future astronaut!
ReplyDeleteHeaven forbid my babies try diving into real black holes!!! I should have thought of that before making the gift!
DeletePerhaps he'll just settle for being an astrophysicist then, if you are lucky!
DeleteThat's a plan! Astrophysicists do very cool stuff without endangering their lives much....
DeleteLove the scientific grandpa-baby conversation! I learned a lot!
ReplyDeleteYes, new scientific horizons were opened by my grandbaby's belly button!
DeleteWhile I'm not convinced to create my own black hole, I am highly entertained by your DH talking astrophysics with Abe. That little guy is quite handsome. And you have hit on a great idea for the basket technique morphed into a toy. The colors are perfect.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jane, these fabrics did seem to me to be perfect for astrophysics!!!
ReplyDelete