Rashmi Sunder-Raj

Designers

Rashmi Sunder-Raj

Mathematical Artist

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

https://mathstodon.xyz/web/@HypercubicPeg

https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2023/bridges2023-469.pdf

Biography

In my youth, I occasionally knitted, crocheted, or sewed items that I was able to wear. But my forays into design primarily involved making or modifying dresses to fit my proportions and somewhat non-standard sense of style in order to attend weddings in my 20s and 30s. I had a desire to incorporate lace into my dresses, but my taste ran towards geometric patterns and a preference to match the color of the lace to the fabrics, making it practically impossible to find appropriate ready-made lace. My experiments at the time led me into crocheting lace with thread and crocheting through sequins. More recently, I have learned to tat, and obtaining a finer hook has allowed me to crochet through seed beads, further expanding my lace-making options. Over the last few years, I have been exploring the properties of what I call “squiggles”, which are a type of geometric structure consisting of circular arcs switching back and forth according to some pattern of lengths. My current explorations in design are based on physically representing squiggles in various ways.

Looks

About the look

Something Old, Something Squiggly

Fabric, thread, sequins

Late 1990s/2023

This began as a dress that I originally made in the late 1990s in order to wear to a relative’s wedding. I remember starting with simple flared skirt or dress pattern, then modifying it to flow from a bodice based on a different pattern that I fitted to my size and shape. I made a partial jacket-like part to frame the lace that I crocheted from matching thread and sewed into the front panel. To make the lace, I started with a simple grid-like pattern and adapted it to the shape that I wanted. One of my modifications this year was to make a replacement panel with a new lace piece representing a pair of my geometric squiggles. I crocheted around pre-attached lengths of sequins, forming roughly circular arcs of linearly increasing length. We can think of the black stitches as lying along edges of 12° (2π/30) sectors, 30 of these sectors would then form a full circle. What I would call an “extended wedge squiggle” obtained using a sequence of 3,6,9,12,…,30 of these will fit within a triangle whose least angle is 18° (2π/20) (see diagram). In this case, the crocheted piece does not include the central or very outer parts of the sectors. The other change was to adapt the upper back to be lace-up instead of zipped in order to accommodate changes to my figure over the last couple of decades.