Tangram

Remember the game Tangram?

My sister had it on her Kindle Fire and I thought it looked fun so I downloaded it to mine and started playing.

It's a puzzle game, and you make different shapes and configurations using the seven flat shapes (called "tans".)

 So I started playing,

and in no time at all I was filling shape after shape, most of them in less than a minute. I finished up the "geometric shapes" and moved on to animals.

Those weren't very hard either, and the thing that aggravated me the most was flipping the yellow parallelogram. It kept getting stuck, and cost me valuable seconds. Heck, I wanted to see if I could solve one in less than 30 seconds (So far my record is 26. They're not all that easy. Some have taken me as much as ten minutes.)

Then I started thinking, "This is lame. It isn't even HARD! How come it is so easy for me? I look at the shape and know quickly how to arrange the pieces, but more importantly, I already understand the relationship of the shapes to each other?  Why is that?

Well, the answer was pretty obvious once I thought about it. These are really nothing more than combinations of variously sized HST's, and as a quiltmaker, I'm intimately familiar with how they work together.

I'm going to continue working my way through them, even though they aren't much of a challenge any more, but seeing the various ways these seven shapes can make various cats, dogs, birds and other animals is a great resource for making free pieced animals. I don't have to make them exactly like the puzzles in the game, but it's a great place to start experimenting.

You know how I keep saying you never know where you'll find inspiration? Well you never know where you'll find a good idea either, or a good resource!