Stringing Along

Remember Cats Cradle? No, you literate devil you, not Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle. Cats Cradle the game - the two-player version of the activity more properly known as String Figures. As in those described in the Arctic String Figure Project - The Diamond Jenness Figures as found on the website of the International String Figure Association, publishers of String Figure Magazine.

As one might readily surmise from the above cited sites, String Figures, and the collecting thereof, is an activity that spans ages, cultures, and several significantly academic disciplines - most notably, mathematics and anthropology.

Before one gets too scientific about this whole stringy phenomenon, one should consider visiting this refreshingly simple collection of animated instructions for three different string figures. Enthused as one might become from the clarity therein, one might then brave a visit to the WWW Collection of Favorite String Figures wherein one will find a veritably vast collection of the aforesaid, with detailed instructions, accompanied by official String Figure Notation. Armed with this knowledge, one might find oneself prepared to string along with Martin Probert's The Survival, Origin and Mathematics of String Figures, wherein one can dangle one's virtual fingers in "a detailed inventory of over 1200 string figure artefacts in more than 20 museums worldwide, papers on 'The British Museum A. C. Haddon String Figures', 'The Origin of String Figures' and 'String Figures and Knot Theory', and sixteen of the author's 21st-century string figures."

Did I mention that the making of String Figures is also a performance art? Well, the Native Americans do it, and so does Brian Cox - The Incredible String Man.