Sevenfold Wooden Table Pattern - 02 Mar 2024

Is it ‘Parquet’?

I think so, but we are talking about a table here, not a floor. Anyway, my mother’s friend has a table that his father made by gluing strips of wood to tracing paper then flipping it over and sanding it. Sounds like a nightmare to get right to me, but this is what it looks like:

Original table image

Pretty nice, of course. However on close inspection there are some odd irregularities. Perhaps that’s to be expected given the heptagons (7-fold centers) in the pattern.

Underlying grid

To dissect this pattern, I traced and re-drew it. Eventually, I realised that it was laid out (I think!) on my old friend the snub sqaure tiling that was seen before in the silver-black weave one. A sketch of it is shown here:

Sketch of table pattern

Here I have put the heptagon corners on the lines, however that makes them irregular! So the choice is either to have irregular heptagons or irregular connections between them. Very tricky pattern to get right…