Seasons Greetings

A very belated thank you to Simon and Louis for my puzzling seasonal greeting cards. 

Simon sent me a great riddle card that made you work for your greeting - with a few clues inside along with a handwritten note claiming it would be too easy for me ... well, Simon, for the record, it wasn't ... I needed all the clues and then one or two more that I picked up from a friendly puzzlers on-line forum before I managed to solve it ... thanks for tickling the little grey cells (more than) a bit. 


...and then Louis, my partner in puzzle-design-crime, conjured up another fantastic impossible folded card to adorn his (now traditional?) Christmas card.

By the way, if it doesn't look all that impossible, ask yourself how the red star got to be quite like that since the only cuts on the card are the ones that you can see and nothing has been rejoined using tape or glue, and that red star is still very much attached to the rest of the card.

Thanks guys! :-)

…more Coolen Creations

1st prototypes

With any luck, when this post is published, I’ll be enjoying the delights of the 32nd International Puzzle Party. Somehow I managed to blag myself an invite in spite of a pathetically small hoard of puzzles and only really having been a slightly serious hoarder for the past three years or so. (Yip, I still can’t bring myself to refer to what I do as collecting or to myself as a collector.)

The IPP is an amazing opportunity to meet puzzlers from around the world, chat to world-renowned collectors, designers and craftsmen about the things they love and share stories about puzzles and puzzling … and I’m sure I’ll be boring you senseless with stories from IPP for a while to come, but in the mean time, here’s the story behind my IPP gift…

...all the prototypes

As a newbie at IPP I thought that it might improve my chances of being liked and accepted (and more importantly, being invited back!) if I took along some little puzzling gift-type-things – you know, bribes! However, as I’m not a designer or a craftsman of any note (any note!), I  was always going to rely on getting something made by someone with far more talent than I have. And given that the target audience here are the world’s greatest collectors, designers and crafters of puzzles, you can’t exactly pick something up off the shelf and make a good impression – so I set about trying to come up with something unusual. 

Final candidates

My first attempt was getting some jigsaw coins cut with some suitable letters cut out of them (IPP 32) – but unfortunately my emails went unanswered so that one didn’t progress any further than an initial enquiry.

My next attempt was foiled when the gent I was hoping could produce something unique for me ended up getting horribly over-stretched at work and totally unable to take on anything extra.

With a couple of weeks to go before IPP, my puzzling mate Louis goes off on holiday with his family and a couple of decks of cards, as you do. Louis had read my blog post on impossible card-folding and decided to have a bit of a bash himself while he was on holiday. Before long he was sending pictures of his work to a couple of us in emails and he’d produced some pretty impressive stuff, so I asked him if he might be interested in producing something for me to dish out at IPP.

He dived in enthusiastically and over the course of the next few evenings produced a couple of alternative designs that he’d email over and we’d discuss, and then a day or two later, some improved designs would arrive until about a week later – and having destroyed at least an entire suit, we’d more or less decided on the features to include and Louis went into fine-tuning mode.

He went out and bought a bunch of different types of playing cards so that he could experiment with designs on the different types of cards and it soon became apparent that not all decks of cards are created equal – and the one I’d thought most suitable turned out to be an absolute pig to work with, so it was dispatched to the junk pile.

We eventually settled on a standard blue-backed Bicycle poker deck and Louis sprang into action setting up a manufacturing process that roped in Mieke with Laura keen to help out as well …

In an attempt to work out how long the postage from Eindhoven to Barnt Green would take, Louis sent over a test package of the design candidates and there was a little bit of nervousness while we waited for the envelope to wander across the channel – and I have to admit that from time to time I had visions of them not getting here in time for me to take them along… but in the end, they got here in just less than a week, which meant that the real ones should all get here in time … even still, we split them into three separate shipments to reduce the risk of them all not making it.

...in case you were wondering...

I did the easy bit once Louis (and Mieke!) had produced all the cards, and printed little frames to mount them on and bagged them all up ready to take along to IPP… cunningly adding a QR code inside the frame that points at this blog post – just in case anyone hasn’t read my blog yet!

I think that Louis has done a pretty awesome job on these – I think the design is clever and really shows off a couple of interesting little “features” to get the brain working a little – it’s one of those things you can glance at and totally miss some of the subtleties- so I’ve tried to highlight a couple of them in the close-up pics …

I reckon they are going to go down rather well at IPP …Thanks Louis! Awesome job, mate!

The business end.

That’s impossible!!

I give you the first impossible object that I’ve added to my collection – a pair of playing cards from Angus Lavery ... and a little story behind them. 

Back at Easter, down in Devon, at James Dalgety’s Easter Puzzle Party, I met an interesting fellow by the name of John Lavery. John is the current organiser of the monthly gatherings of puzzlers and magicians at Camden Lock (2nd Tuesday of the month – shout if you want the details!) since Ray Bathke stepped down after organising them for several years. I’d seen his name on the regular emails, but since I haven’t managed to get down to one of the Camden Lock do’s yet, I hadn’t actually met him. 

My introduction to John came as he was showing a couple of us an album he’d put together to showcase brother Angus’ incredible card-folding skills ... he was flicking through the album and taking the odd card out and passing them around for closer inspection while he was telling stories about the designs: Angus came up with this one in about fifteen minutes after Christmas dinner one year – he disappeared into the kitchen and came out with this – as he held up a complicated set of about five interconnected cards, each with its own impossible fold, yet somehow appearing rather solidly interlinked with the others.  

 

Some would be dismissed with a comment about the particular design losing quite a lot of material, so they don’t look as impressive – and others would have something rather subtle about them that needed pointing out – at least to the largely uninitiated, like myself. I’d come across impossible card-folding a couple of times on my trawling around the internet – seen some pictures (mainly trapdoor cards) and had to look at some of them a couple of times before I realised what the impossible bit was (told you I was a philistine!). 

I’d also come across a chapter in one of my puzzle books [Puzzlers Tribute – A Feast for the Mind] on impossible card-folding by Luc de Smet – and it showed how to create one class of impossible card, but apart from that, my research (read: surfing!) has turned up very little else. From what I can gather, the basic rules of impossible card-folding are: cutting and folding is allowed – rejoining anything isn’t, so if it looks like it’s joined, it always has been...

Anyway, back to John’s tour through Angus’ body of work – and there’s one card in there that is totally mind-blowing: a standard sized playing card with the Olympic Rings cut and folded so that each ring is half cut-out and half folded-over card – except that all five rings are interlinked wherever they overlap! Remember the rules? No rejoining, ever ... John told us that this is one of Angus' harder designs and it has a non-trivial failure rate – and looking at just how little material is left to keep the two halves of the rings together, and trying to imagine the amount of folding and turning inside out that these cards have to go through to get those rings interlinked – that’s hardly surprising! 

 

A couple of days later I got in touch with Angus and asked if there was any chance he’d be prepared to make up a couple for me as “Thank-you”s for a pair of puzzlers who’ve been rather kind to me, and who already have every-puzzling-thing that I could imagine trying to give them – and I was very chuffed (and quite a bit surprised – after all he didn’t know me from Adam and I was expecting a reaction more along the lines of “I’d rather stick pins in my eye than go through that again”) when he agreed ... and a few weeks later I received a well-packaged set of little picture frames from Angus: three of his incredible Olympic Ring cards and a copy of his very first impossible card design.

I’ve sat and stared at these cards for ages, and I reckon I’m no closer to understanding how the heck they work than when I first saw one in John’s album at Easter – truly impossible objects – courtesy of Angus Lavery’s incredible card-folding wizardry!

[Oh, and in case you’re wondering – they loved them! Thanks Angus!  :-) ] 

Postscript: my mate Oli has had a go at playing around with creating some of his own - have a look over here! Nice one Oli!!