String Art

String Art, also called pin and thread art or filography, is the hobby of arranging colored thread strung between fixed points to build up geometric patterns or representational images, traditionally by winding thread, wire or string around nails driven into a velvet-covered wooden board. Although every individual strand of thread is perfectly straight, the slightly different angle and position at which the strands cross one another creates the visual illusion of a curved line, mathematically equivalent to an envelope of straight lines forming a smoothly curved shape. The craft traces back to curve-stitching activities invented by the mathematician Mary Everest Boole at the end of the nineteenth century as a way to make geometry more approachable for children, and it became popular as a decorative hobby craft in the late 1960s through commercial kits and instructional books; related variants include Spirelli, used in cardmaking and scrapbooking, and curve stitching worked through punched holes rather than nails.