Laurie and Debbie say:

I (Laurie) was in Seattle staying with Vonda McIntyre and visiting with friends last week. Vonda is a marvelous (and multiple-award-winning) science fiction writer and she is also a maker of fabulous sea creatures.

Her house has really magical clusters of anemones, jellyfish and other creatures of the sea. They’re made from tiny beads and are three-dimensional, vivid and alive. While she was there I helped her set up a window box with semiprecious rocks and lots of her undersea denizens.

Vonda and her sea creatures have also been written up in Science News Online.

She told me a lot about crafts based on math, science and nature, a design area I was unaware of. When I got home I talked to Debbie about science/crafts and we decided it would be fun to blog about it and show you some examples and links.

This quilt is from the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art (no, really!).

Neither of us is as clear as we would like to be on exactly what a Lorenz manifold is, but apparently crocheting “the famous Lorenz equations that describe the nature of chaotic systems” was both a complex task and turned out to be a very good way to demonstrate a multidimensional concept in a three-dimensional world.

Debbie has followed science artist Bathsheba Grossman for some time; she does astronomicals and molecules in metal or lucite, and also some stunning science concepts, like this Quaternion Julia fractal carved in lucite.

The Institute for Figuring brings us this giant coral reef project, crocheted by thousands of volunteers from around the world. The link includes an email where you can contribute your own piece of the reef (or of their “Toxic Reef,” made from yarn and plastic trash).

There’s lots more, and here’s a pattern for a hand-knit DNA helix scarf that any knitters out there can make for themselves.

Many of the above links are from Vonda.