Plastic Canvas Icosahedron

It isn’t unusual around Christmas time that I do some sketches, get out some graph paper and work on a Plastic Canvas project for someone on my list. Usually my patterns are in the form of cartoon characters (such as Beavis or Cartman) or Hokie Birds. This year, I did something a little different for the science geek on my list. I made a plastic canvas icosahedron. It’s not a cartoon character, but it did have a solid role in the Futurama: Bender’s Game movie!

An icosahedron is a 20-sided platonic solid. In the regular icosahedron, each face is an equilateral triangle. Icosahedrons are everywhere. If you shake a Magic Eight ball, your fortune is being reported back to you by an icosahedron. Like Scattergories or role playing games? The die you play with is an icosahedron. Do you have herpes? Well then, my friend, you are infected with microscopic icosahedrons!

Icosahedrons at Work – Magic Eight Ball (Photo by greeblie), 20 Sided Dice (Photo by slayer23), Scattergories (Photo by JimmyMac210), Herpes Virus (Photo from Health News Blog)

And as if herpes and Magic Eight Balls are not treasure enough, you can now have your very own icosahedron constructed out of plastic canvas!

Plastic Canvas Icosahedron (Pictured with a souvenir lizard from Jost Van Dyke)

It was actually one of the more simple stitching projects I have taken on. The steps are quite easy:

	1) At Michael’s, I purchased some nifty hexagon shaped sheets of plastic canvas. They are also available online at Everything Plastic Canvas. You’ll need four hexagons for this project.
	2) I cut each hexagon into six equilateral triangles. That gave me 24 rectangles– 20 for my solid and 4 extra.
	3) Stitch each triangle to your preference. I just used a simple backstitch using decreasing shades of purple and a black center.
	4) Start stitching the triangles together. I found it much easier to put the pieces back to back as long as I could (That gets more difficult as our solid takes shape). I used a standard overcast stitch. I typically did two stitches in each hole, with extra stitches at the triangle points for additional support.
	5) With the assembly strategy, I first stitched five of the triangles together to create a little cap.
	6) Next, I stitched an upside down triangle to the bottom of each triangle in the cap.
	7) Between each of those newly attached upside down triangles, I stitched a right-side up triangle. After that endeavor, there were 15 pieces sewn together.
	8] I set aside my work so far and stitched another five piece cap. Now I had two sections– a 15 piece section and a small 5 piece cap.
	9) Finally– I stitched my two sections together and viola — Plastic Canvas Icosahedron.

Additional Icosahedron Projects

Now say you covet your very own icosahedron, but you don’t want to work with plastic canvas and you don’t really want herpes. You can make icosahedrons with just about any arts and craft technique and out of a variety of materials– even marshmallows! Here’s a quick collection of links to help guide you on your icosahedron whims:

Technique/Materials	Link
Origami	Instruction Video
Knitting	Blog | Photo
Crochet	Blog
Designer Paper	Blog
Zome Tool	Blog
Map	Photo
Picture	Photo
Wire	Photo
Marshmallows and Toothpicks	Photo

Do you have your own icosahedron project? Let me know! I’d love to hear about it!