5x5x5 Dado Rail

The varying-width stripes remind me of the way a chair rail divides a wall between the dado below and the...uh... non-dado part.

But when viewed from a different angle it's easy to see this is just a simple 3-cycle pattern. (More precisely, it's two slightly different 3-cycle patterns.)

5x5 Grecian Urn 2

This string pattern has the same layout as my previous Grecian Urn 1 but with a somewhat more complicated arrangement of colors, so the side faces have four colors each. No two string fragments on the same face are the same color.

Too complicated? Here's a schematic showing how the pieces are laid out on the cube.

5x5 M.C. Escher's Pretzel

M.C. Escher used to draw all sorts of pictures of impossible objects like stairways that ascended in loops and waterfalls that drained into their own tributaries.

If M.C. Escher tried to draw a pretzel, it just might have looked something like this cube pattern.

5x5 Parallels

This string pattern wraps around 4 sides of the cube, leaving the top & bottom blank. The string rises and descends on alternate sides. On the 3x3 there's one string, but on the 4x4 there are two parallel strings, and on the 5x5 there are three parallel strings.

The picture at right shows the reverse sides.

Octahedron Christmas Trees

Okay, there's nothing particularly Christmas-like about this pattern. It's just a vague depiction of a tree, but I chose to call it a Christmas Tree because of the season.

Woolworths used to sell decorations like this back in the 70's when abstract geometric shapes were the "in" thing.

Pyraminx Christmas and Hanukkah

This is a chance color scheme that appeared while I was toying with Meffert's 25th Anniversary Edition Metallized Pyriaminx. When the colors are permuted as shown the red-green sides suggest a Christmas color scheme while the gold-blue sides (roughly) suggest a Hanukkah color scheme.

The color scheme isn't a perfect match, but it's powerfully suggestive when holding the puzzle solved this way.

5x5 Curvy Snake

This is a 5x5 variant of the standard "snake" pattern from the 3x3 cube, but with curves added.

I made this pattern during a holiday in Hawaii and accidentally stumbled on the Tropical Petals pattern afterward. So the simplest way to create either of these patterns is to first arrange the edges as shown here for the Curvy Snake, then adjust the center pieces to match either the Curvy Snake or Tropical Petals pattern.