Yes – It’s time for me to embrace the Granny Life.
Not a sentence I was expecting to write any time soon. And also nothing to do with the recent realisation that my personal Meldrew Point is fast approaching next month (no, “I don’t believe it” either), but more to do with the possibility of taking part in a mass participation mathematically inspired data physicalisation going on public display. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that all those things together are right up my street, leaving me excited to participate in a project that covers so many of my own data visualisation fascinations, and be part of a public art display for the first time in my life (with the exception of the Tableau Public galleries on display at conferences),
The hitch? I’m going to need to learn to crochet. I think that might be a pun, but I’m so inexpert and paralysed by fear at the thought of getting started, that I don’t even know! More on that later …
First: a definition. Wikipedia defines a granny square as “a piece of square fabric produced in crochet by working in rounds from the center outward. Granny squares are traditionally handmade as crochet and cannot be manufactured by machine.”
The project I’m talking about is Granny Life Crochet – imagined and organised by Dr. Laura Taalman, otherwise known as @mathgrrl, at https://grannylifecrochet.com. Here’s the brief synopsis – a community-driven project where one hundred crocheters (experienced, novice, or, ahem, less than novice) each crochet a two-colour granny square, with a unique mathematically generated pattern. Those squares are all carefully stitched together to make a 10×10 grid of 100 granny squares. The squares themselves are more intricately patterned than the generic example above, allowing for a full trellis of unique patterned dual colour squares:
The final project will be something like a physical crocheted version of the 10×10 grid of granny squares. Most exciting of all, the project has been accepted for display an exhibition in Paris in 2026 https://www.ihp.fr/en/actualites-science-et-societe/creation-entre-art-et-mathematiques-aap
So what’s the maths behind each unique square? The full mathematical explanation is due to be here on the website – at time of writing this is still to be uploaded! The patterns themselves are related to Wolfram code and cellular automata. Here’s an explanation from Dr. Taalman on the algorithm used to generate the granny square patterns in the meantime:
The “rule 6” I eventually decided to use for the art project is “6” because an alive cell stays on only if it has NO alive neighbors, and a dead cell turns alive only if it has exactly one alive neighbor. In the Wolfram notation you sum up terms with a 2^(2k) if a dead cell comes alive for k neighbors, and a 2^(2k+1) if an alive cell stays alive for k neighbors, so the rule I described is 2^(2*1)+2^(2*0+1) = 2^2+2^1 = 4+2 = 6. I think of this as the “introvert” rule, since alive cells turn off after a neighbor shows up, and dead cells turn on only to say hello briefly to someone if there is only one alive cell nearby, then they turn off in the next cycle. Somehow this really simple rule makes pretty consistently good patterns, and they are really matchy and share some simple characteristics across all generations (center, midlines, and border are always dead/off after the initial generation).
Anyway what I have here are sort of 2D totalistic cellular automata rotated 90 degrees and spread out with gaps inbetween, to match the physical craft of the stitches. I’m using “wrapping” so the edge stitches get identified with ones on the other side. The white border is artificial and added after the calculations.
Now you don’t need to understand the above in order to get started, but it’s an algorithm that allows you to generate a unique symmetrical granny square given the choice of a particular integer.
My square will look like this (go to the website and it will generate the square for you for your chosen number). I chose the number 42, which is an exciting example of steganography encoded in textile, encoding the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Now I hadn’t quite realised that I agreed to take part in this project right at the start of August. Why over three months of inactivity? I promised to crochet my square, and I promised to blog about the project and process. I offer a huge apology to Laura – the crochet square is so far out of my comfort zone that I have had a huge block getting started. I’ve bought the hook, the yarn, all the kit I need. I’ve even taken it overseas with me, once to a week long conference in Austria and once to a week on holiday in Italy, with the intention of getting started in a quiet hotel room or a Tuscan garden balcony, yet still the yarn is still unrolled, packed away in my backpack, and the square is totally unstarted. The YouTube videos look simple, yet terrifying. They assume 1% aptitude. I have zero. And I’m strangely terrified to get started.
I will do this!
And the best thing is, so can all of you. A huge number of squares have been claimed, but a number of squares are still available for you to take part. Choose a number from 1-255 that hasn’t already been claimed, check out the website, claim your square, and your granny square could be in Paris, along with mine. Ideally, squares need to be sent to Laura by December, meaning that you do still have time. And, so do I! Due to the popularity of the project, the final project will be potentially more than 100 granny squares in 10×10, and will grow to a suitable sized rectangle to allow for all the submitted squares.
There will be a Granny Life Part II post that includes my square. And who knows, maybe a Granny Life Part III post that shows it in situ in Paris! But most of all, I’m excited to expand my data visualisation skills further away from screens and the online world and into a physical piece on show for enthusiasts to see.
The project is billed as “Granny Life Community Project – CALLING ALL CROCHET GEEKS AND GRANNIES — Crochet a mathematical granny square for an art exhibit”. I’d add dataviz geeks to that list (though maybe when I finally get round to making a start, I’ll eventually become a crochet geek?) – In any case, I’m in!
Questions in Dataviz 