Making the Big N

by royshearer in Craft > Art

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Making the Big N

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Last week was Nilk, the finest day of music and arts to be had in Dundee's Botanic Gardens. I was asked to make a big decorative N for the event - I ended up making one inspired by box kites, to be hung from a tree. Here it is rigged up in the courtyard of the studios:

 
The form is a bit of a geometric fun: the N is viewable from both the front and below, thanks to Rhinoceros, Boolean intersections and the UnrollSrf command, which can lay out all faces of a 3D object flat for you to make cutting patterns from!
 
The thing is constructed out of ripstop nylon offcuts (from the magnificent GPA) and bamboo stakes (from the gardening shop), sewn and cable-tied together, plus a little insulation tape. Many thanks to Fergus for his advice here, I'd never have guessed that insulation tape sticks so well to bamboo and not to nylon! 


I couldn't make it up there for the day sadly, so I made an Instructable as installation instructions here.