This was a result of a serendipitous miscommunication.
Since I got my hands on some Corian scraps, I’ve been trying to think of good things to make out of it. I had never played with them before, but a tangram set looked like a good fit.
I printed out a tangram pattern and asked Mary Cate how big she thought I should make it. She then answered either “no bigger than that” or “no smaller than that”, depending on which one of us you ask. I went ahead and made the biggest set I could out of the scraps that I had available:
We played around with it, and while it was neat, it was just too darn big. Mary Cate was right! Or wrong! So I made another tangram set, half the size (in area) of the first one. Better, but maybe still too big, so I made an even smaller set, half the size of the previous one. And then for good measure, I did it again:
The neat thing about each one being half the size of the previous one is that a tangram is built out of triangles that are 2 and 4 times the size of the smallest one, so the pieces from one set fit together with the other sets.
It also means that these sets together are really good for making fractal patterns:
Porter's Workshop 