25 Squares, 25 Circles, 25 Stars

For a project I had to cut out 25 squares, circles, and stars each, all of which had to be 2 inches in side length, diameter, and line-to-line respectively. And then we had to lay them out in a creative way!

So here are each of the pieces! (Btw yes, I know they aren't that clean, I'll do that later)

For the first piece, the squares, I laid them out in a seemingly random pattern, but it actually follows the shape of a Glider from Conway's Game of Life, a formation which moves diagonally across the space (in this case, from top right to bottom left). Each smaller 3x3 grid from right to left, and then top to bottom, is from this sequence.

For the second piece, the circles, I laid them out in a hexagonal shape. Nineteen circles can compose a hexagon, leaving out just six of them which I stuck in the corners! This is probably the simplest of them all, but hey, hexagons are the bestagons.

And the third piece, the stars, is probably my favourite in terms of general composition (but also the hardest and most inconsistent to cut, but whatever). 25 is a square number, meaning that it can be represented as a sum of consecutive odd numbers (1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9). I made a circle (or at least a quarter of it) using this formation, and I moved the single star of the smallest layer to the opposite corner in the top right, creating some contrast! I didn't think of an exact meaning for this one, so I leave it up for interpretation.

And that's it! This was a project mainly just to get me used to using a utility knife, and although I still have a lot of work to do, I did definitely get better! And it was extremely interesting to find what I could do with such a specific set of requirements