Weeknotes

I found the concept of weeknotes elsewhere and I'd like to try it out to give some more persistence to what I do. I'll try to cover what I was busy with in the week before writing the notes, and just share what I feel is interesting.

Spray Nozzle

I got a spray nozzle for one of my water taps and I really like it every time I wash my hands. It's sold cheaply by IKEA and I got one used from Kleinanzeigen.^[1] The reviews on the IKEA website are very mixed: People either love it or complain that it does not work. I was afraid to fall into the second camp, until I put the old nozzle into citric acid, dissolving the limescale and being able to swap out the inner sieve with one that came with the nozzle.

It's a very, very fine spray, saving somewhere upwards of 90% of water. This means it's too little for the boiler to activate, but it's a very nice, soft feeling on my skin.

I wanted to try it out since I read about mist showers in the Low-tech mag. I'm living in one of the driest areas of Europe, and it's drying out even faster than most other areas. Water rationing is very likely happening soon, it's already pretty common not too far away. I feel like experiments like this allow me to come to terms with it in a playful way, and in a way that doesn't feel restricted or imposed, but rather lush and just smarter.

It could be a cool thing to try when organizing festivals as well!

Hitomezashi Patterns

I found out about Hitomezashi patterns last week. I don't know very much about them to be honest, and I'll gladly learn more. What I know is that they are a type of stitch pattern that originated some hundreds of years ago as a form of Sashiko, embroidery that is used for both aesthetic and functional purposes.^[2] Nowadays it also seems to be pretty hot as a mindfulness practice on YouTube, so I hope I'm not coming across as completely tone-deaf for playing around with it. This whole "repairing things" shtick is pretty dear to me, and if there's an interesting aesthetic connected to it, I'm even more interested.

Put simply, the rules of the mathematical model are like this:

• Draw a square on a dotted grid, one dot is the unit to use. Start with a small grid, something like 5 × 5
• Draw a pattern of zeroes and ones on each axis, one digit for each step on the axis
• Pick an axis and start drawing the stitches perpendicular to it: If there's a zero, start at the axis and draw a line for one unit, leave one out, draw a line. If there's a one, start the series of stitches by leaving one line out, drawing a line, leaving one out again…
• Repeat the previous step for the other axis

That's it. You should have a nice pattern! If the previous steps were hard to follow, there's a Numberphile video that explains it nicely. I have also created a small webapp that allows you to toy around with different patterns and save the result as SVG.

It's nice to see how different the shapes look, depending on the different patterns of ones and zeroes, only a small bit of information showing complex behavior. I liked how after a short while I could figure out how to cause kinks in the shapes, and draw diamonds.

I took the resulting shape to a friend's self-built plotter / CNC mill – probably the largest I've seen with a drawing area of more than A2. The pen holder had a bit of wiggle room on one axis, so the result didn't look as good as I'd hoped for a pattern that's this precise. I'm looking forward to figuring this out at some point, so I can put some of those patterns on my wall.

I really liked how said friend was able to pick up the code pretty quickly, and made their own modifications to draw patterns based on their own rules. They told me they never made generative art before, and were completely hooked.