A few days ago an interesting tweet from Make Magazine caught my eye, it was about giant multi-sided God’s Eyes. They were beautiful of course, but being an engineer, I was trying to figure out how the guy who made them does it.
The first problem I saw was that with a garden variety God’s Eye, you just have to sticks that cross. While they aren’t in the same plane, they are close enough. When you start making 8 or 12 sided ones, you just can’t overlap sticks, you’ll end up with a warped looking project. My solution was to use a dowel with eight holes equally spaced around the edge for a hub.
Since they were cheap and I had plenty of them, I used skewers for the spokes. I used a V-block to hold the dowel in position while I lined up the bit and the end markings by eye. Once I had all the holes drilled I cut off the end of the dowel. The resulting hub reminded me of a tinker toy. All that was left was to glue the skewers into the hub.
The resulting frame turned out to be too big for my winding skills, I had about 20 feet of yarn wound onto the frame before I gave up and cut the spokes to 6 inched long. I also realized that it I was going to do multi-colored, inter-weaved patterns I would need to wind more than one string of yarn at a time.
I was going for a white hour glass shape on a red background, but I found that I was getting more of a coffin shape. I knew that I wasn’t going to produce a masterpiece my first time, but I definitely have a better appreciation for Mohler (the giant God’s Eye guy). I also find that it’s usually more interesting to look at the back of the God’s Eye, kind of like it’s cool to look at the back of an embroidered emblem.