Bonus Denizen for All: The Magical Midnight Mermaid Mathematician Scarf

I wanted to show everybody this because I’m just so proud of it! They’ll be another proper Denizen this month, though, don’t worry.

Here on the island, one of the churches has a twice yearly rummage sale where you donate what you can per bag you take, and we all bring old stuff to find new homes. Lately, there’s been SEVERAL KIDDIE POOLS full of incredible, untouched, often quite high end yarn…all my fiber buddies be still your hearts, it’s AWESOME.

So I had my 6 year old Bastian choose whatever they wanted and I’d make them a scarf. They picked…well, exactly what I would pick, all dark jewel tones and sparkle and fun fur and goth rainbows. I looked at it all and asked what it made them think of, all the shades and textures together. They thought about it and said “a midnight mermaid!” and I got to work.

But then I had an idea, because I had a lot of beads lying around. Not just a scarf, but a fidget scarf so they could fiddle with the beads and lace-holes in class to help them focus without making a big distraction for other kids.

And THEN, because Bastian loves math, I wondered if I could rig this thing up to be a wearable abacus of sorts, if I could order the beads in such a way that one could conceivably do math by running your scarf through your fingers.

Turns out…you can. Basically you can do just about any arithmetic problem by counting with this scarf. There’s many different patterns embedded within it (see pics) that can be felt with the fingertips without looking OR observed visually. A few of them…

In the white pearly row, every 9th bead is different, so you can count, multiply, and divide by nines. There another of clear glass cube beads where every 5th bead is turquoise and round, for counting by fives, a row that’s half sets of two beads separated by two holes between (2s and 4s) and half sets of two beads separated by eight holes (8s and 10s). The bottom edge has bobble squares with three bobbles each on one side or the other altenrating for 3s and 6s. 10 stripes in all, 20 colors, and so on and so forth.

Bastian’s teachers are all delighted with it, and while I’m still teaching them all the ways to use it, they love how fancy they feel in it and are all over the 9/pearl row multiplying and adding with glee.

I’m not overly a math person! So I’m pretty dang proud at managing to pull this thing together and make it work for my tiny darling. I hope you like it too!