In search of the Carolingian Cross

In my last blog posting, I noted an interesting shape based upon the triquetra I'd found in a wikipedia article and was pretty sure could be accomplished with poi--I've spent most of the past evening and day thinking through how and coming up with different approaches to it.

About mid-day today, I thought I'd had it: imagine a square, bisected through both corners. You start at the middle and do a single triquetra, but when you reach the point of origin, you perform another triquetra 90 degrees off of the first one and so on and so forth all the way around the square. I discovered I could do the pattern in under 3 seconds which, according to Abject, is what I should be shooting for to create a recognizable pattern. Below is a diagram I did in Illustrator to visualize the concept.



There's just one problem: this doesn't actually come out looking like the Carolingian Cross in the wikipedia entry. Conceptually they bear similarities, but there is no distinction between the triquetra nodes at each corner. Back to the drawing board.

Using the same method, I tried separating out the center nodes till it began to have the same appearance as the wikipedia figure:



As you can see, the hand path is no longer a simple square--in fact, it appears to be an antispin flower in its own right. Months ago I'd toyed with the idea of compound flowers in this way and this appears to be an excellent test of the idea. Back to practice--let's see if this one is doable.

Further adventures with Triquetras

For most of the past year, I've called this trick a trifoil or antispin flower hybrid, yet somehow overnight the terminology switched to triquetra and I didn't know why until Nick Woolsey posted his latest online tutorial.



The source of the name is interesting to me--especially given that I grew up in a Lutheran church (well, not literally) and triquetra patterns could be found all around. Catholics tend to like their iconography, such as the crucifix and many pictures/paintings of saints and holy people while Protestants tend to wind up with more abstract patterns in their churches. After viewing Nick's vid, I went and checked up on what wikipedia had to say about triquetras and found this helpful article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra

Among the interesting tidbits in it is a fascinating figure that's got my creative juices flowing that includes a triquetra knot in four corners of what looks to me like a four-petal antispin flower. If indeed I'm right in this assessment, I reckon it should be possible to do this figure with poi. As each corner looks like it represents 3/4 of a full circle, my theory is that by stopping at each corner and waiting till the poi is in that 3/4 position before moving on to the next corner, a body can render this knot. Essentially this means that you'd be stopping your hand to let the poi catch up at each corner and then moving it swiftly past the nearest compass point. I'll do a vid if this approach works.