Robes de Coeur
  • Blog
  • Quilting
  • Clothing
    • Menswear
    • Womenswear >
      • Self-Made Patterns
      • Commercial Patterns
    • Hats
    • Miscellany
  • About
  • Blog
  • Quilting
  • Clothing
    • Menswear
    • Womenswear >
      • Self-Made Patterns
      • Commercial Patterns
    • Hats
    • Miscellany
  • About

"Cracked Ice" Surface Design - Part 1

11/28/2022

1 Comment

 
In mundanity, complexity.  A sheet of ice, cracking as it thaws, inspires artists, woodworkers, scientists, and me!  Today's post is a deep dive into a surface design pattern called "Cracked Ice", which is common in traditional Chinese art. 

COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS

This post uses some photos that are available under free public licenses.  I put the attribution and copyright details under each borrowed picture; clicking on a borrowed picture will open its source page in a new window. 

A few of the pictures are my own, and I label them as well.  As a blanket rule, the pictures, writing, and other content of this blog are my property unless otherwise noted.  Feel free to link to, pin, or share these pages online, as long as you credit me (Karen Roy), preferably with a link back.  Please ask my permission before redistributing or reproducing my work in any other way.  ​
Picture
Cracked Ice, by Timo Noko from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Picture
冰裂窗 Cracked Ice Window, by lienyuan lee, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
In my post about tessellations, I wrote briefly about the process of looking for information in foreign languages when you don't speak or read those languages.  I do this often, as for instance in my recent post about Japanese noshi motifs in kimono, or my past research on French needlelace.  But I've never documented the course of these internet perambulations before!  I usually present my findings as an essay, not a log; this time I shall present the information in the order of discovery, and explain how I found it.  As you read this, imagine you are looking over my shoulder while I look up the cracked ice pattern. 

Switching to present tense...

I BEGIN IN A GARDEN

It's fitting that this learning journey starts in a scholar's garden, specifically the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon.  I visit on November 15th, 2022, and take this picture of one of its pebble mosaic walkways:
Picture
(C) 2022. Photo by Karen Roy, at the Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland Oregon.
The tour guide calls the pattern "Crackling ice", and mentions that it is a common Chinese design, expressing a transitory moment: winter and spring, ice and thaw, solid and liquid, all at once.  This particular walkway also has blossoms scattered on it, further juxtaposing youth against age.  I find it lovely, and once home I search online for "crackling ice", but have better luck with "cracked ice". 

A WOODWORKER'S INTRIGUE

My first hit for "Cracked Ice Chinese" is "Cracked Ice: East to West", a post on Wilbur Pan's giant Cypress blog.  Like me, he finds the pattern cool, but he has some real questions about how to lay it out: 
. . . I’ve been thinking about how I would lay out a pattern like this for at least 5 years now, and I still have no idea how to do it. It’s easy to lay out a random pattern of triangles and polygons. It’s much harder to do that in a way that looks good, and in the case of woodworking, good enough so that you can look at it for a few decades and not find it annoying. 

I’ve had a number of conversations with George Walker over the years, and more recently Jim Tolpin, about this design. They haven’t figured it out, either. We’re all sure that there are some sort of guidelines that can direct how to lay out this pattern. We just don’t know what it is.

- Wilbur Pan, July 2017
I agree with them: that the pattern is ubiquitous over a long period of time and different art media, yet not repetitive, suggests that the makers are following a principle rather than copying a pattern.  Up 'til now, I have just been trying to find any information I can about the cracked ice design; now, thanks to Pan, I have more focused research questions: (1) What are the design principles at play in this design? and (2) What distinguishes a successful cracked ice pattern from an unsuccessful one? 
Below are two very different takes on the design, each with its charm.  The Chinese saddle rug from the 1700's has cracked ice which seems a little more right-angled than the window examples I've seen.  The Japanese ceramic from the 1800's is painted, and has larger ice pieces artistically interspersed with smaller ones.  I think it might be easier to replicate than the other examples I've seen... I might start with a large, irregular brickwork kind of pattern, and then chip away at the edges with smaller lines. 
Picture
Saddle Rug with Pattern of Cracked Ice - China 18th Century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Picture
Brush Washer or Water Dropper with Cracked-Ice Design - Japan 19th Century. LACMA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

MUD PUDDLES

Tupper Wallace, commenting on Wilbur Pan's post, has this to say: "In nature, a shrinking surface cracks sequentially with each crack forming in a direction perpendicular to the greatest stress across each subdivision. . . This might suggest how to lay out a natural appearing pattern."  He references drying mud puddles as an example, so I follow that track, next.  Mud puddles and ice are not the same, but they both crack as the material in them shrinks.  I find a paper on ResearchGate with the scintillating title "Evolution of Mud-Crack Patterns during Repeated Drying Cycles". 

Imagine you have a puddle in your yard, and it dries out and cracks in the midday sun, but there's enough groundwater and ambient moisture to wet it again every night.  According to this paper, the first time it cracks, the cracks will form T-shaped intersections.  Then, with each subsequent wetting-and-drying, the cracks will re-form in the same spots, but the intersections will get softer, eventually becoming Y-shaped.  The areas between the cracks will go from being rectangular to hexagonal.  This is fascinating: just by looking at the angles of the cracks, you can tell if the surface has dried just once, or repeatedly!

Wondering whether this relates to ice as well as mud, I look anew at the first picture in this post, the ice in Norway.  I figure that the solid mass near the top has only thawed a little, but the smaller, broken pieces at the edge of the water probably thaw more every day, then re-freeze a little at night.  This is a cycle of thawing and freezing, not drying and wetting, but since the material shrinks and expands either way, I expect to see similarities.  And maybe I do... a little.  The very top right corner of the picture, the mostly solid ice, has rectilinear shapes and T-intersections, while the stuff near the water has Y-intersections.  But it also has acute angles, and the pieces  are not regularly hexagonal.  Moreover, the ice in the picture is subject to stresses like the wind and waves physically moving it and abrasion against other pieces of ice. 
Likewise, this glacial ice shows some T-intersections in the middle, where the break seems new, then a variety of angles near the bottom, where the decay of the structure is more advanced.  Glacial ice is not the same as regular ice, since regular ice is a frozen liquid, and glacial ice is compacted snow (crystalized in a different form, then compacted like sedimentary rock), but the shapes are still illustrative. 
Picture
NASA ICE, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In either ice picture, we have factors at play besides thawing and shrinking, so they're not good comparisons to the mud example.  They are, however, good comparisons to the Chinese design!  Because the Chinese cracked ice design doesn't have rectilinear or hexagonal shapes; it has triangles and polygons, with a mix of acute, obtuse, and sometimes right angles.  So perhaps the mud article sheds only a dim light on this question. 

Maybe the materials science researchers who looked at the mud could direct my inquiries in a more fruitful direction?  I send an email to Bill Clegg, one of the paper's authors (the one who uploaded the paper to ResearchGate).  In my email I briefly introduce myself and the puzzle I'm trying to solve, before politely requesting any pointers he can give. 

FOUND AT MACY'S

A little before Thanksgiving, I am doing some early Christmas shopping at the mall, and I see this screen as part of a Macy's clothing display.  Like the Chinese cracked ice design, it has the fractured multi-triangle look... but unlike the Chinese design, this one DOES have an identifiable repeat.  Here, let me slip around the back for an unimpeded view. 
Picture
(C) 2022. Photo by Karen Roy, at Macy's, in the Clackamas Town Center Mall, Oregon.
Picture
(C) 2022. Photo by Karen Roy, at Macy's, in the Clackamas Town Center Mall, Oregon.
Not only are there clear gridlines going across it -- on grain and on point -- but within the grids there are repeating 4-patches.  In quilting, I have seen similar effects in crazy quilts and string quilts, where many "crazy" elements are trimmed into squares of the same size, then sewn together.  Whoever designed this made four unique "crazy" pieces, unified by the larger gridlines, and repeated the pattern. 
Mind you, I'm not dissing it just because I can dissect it!  I think it's pretty!  But I wonder if cracked ice was the inspiration, or whether it's meant to suggest dried branches against a trellis or something.  As to my second research question, "what distinguishes a successful cracked ice pattern from an unsuccessful one?", I'd call this an unsuccessful one because of the clear grids.  If I am trying to replicate a true Chinese cracked ice, I don't want to see straight lines across the whole piece, nor repeating elements. 

A MUSICAL INTERLUDE

With renewed interest, I find myself back at Wilbur Pan's giant Cypress blog.  He mentions that he has written an article on Chinese furniture, due to be published soon in Popular Woodworking.  Since his post is from July 2017 and it's now November 2022, I search for "Popular Woodworking Wilbur Pan" and find it right away!  "An Overview of Chinese Furniture", by Wilbur Pan, posted to their website September 30, 2021.  Alas, I can only read the first paragraph before the shy little article scurries off behind a registration wall.  I am not interested in being a member of Popular Woodworking, so I dig around similar search terms to see if I can get the content free/easily.
  • I discover that Popular Woodworking has a YouTube channel, and Wilbur Pan has several videos there.  Plus a presentation on Japanese chisels, for the Woodworkers Guild of Rhode Island. (None relate to cracked ice.) 
  • I discover that tempered glass sometimes explodes without warning!  (Making similar cracks to the cracked ice pattern... so this is sort of relevant.) 
  • I discover a musical artist named Will Pan / 潘瑋柏.  I run his name through Google Translate, and it tells me it's phonetically "Pānwěibǎi" and translates it to "Wilber Pan".  (Which is not relevant to cracked ice at all... but I put on a Will Pan playlist as my soundtrack while I keep looking.) 
Picture
A Will Pan video which Google translates to "[Eden] Official Complete". The framework behind him is very "cracked ice". It also looks very unstable! Notice in cracked ice windows, the pattern is only decorative, never load-bearing!

I return to the internet to hunt for more information about the pattern, but this time I know I have to venture into Chinese waters... even though I don't the Chinese words to search for! 

But that's a story for Part 2... this post is already quite long! 
1 Comment
The Sister
12/27/2022 12:36:39 pm

So a few thoughts:
* I can't believe people have spent their time studying the cracking pattern of mud puddles, and yet clearly there is call for that kind of research!
* This made me think of the veins of leaves -- check out this Instagram post where a dried up leaf inspired a metallic ink drawing: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-cGFc5DA05/
* I laughed that you put on the Wilbur Pan playlist simply because of the name similarity!
* On Etsy I have purchased cracked marbles for a Chinese Checkers game board; they are baked in a hot oven until they crack but before they explode! They make very pretty marbles which catch the light fetchingly, but they are way easier to shatter than regular marbles.

On to Post 2!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Karen Roy

    Quilting, dressmaking, and history plied with the needle...

    Categories

    All
    1910's
    Alteration
    Antique
    Dyeing
    Embroidery
    General
    Hand Sewing
    History
    Lacemaking
    Mending
    Menswear
    Millinery
    Modern Elizabethan
    Musing
    Other Sewing
    Philippians 4:8
    Project Diary
    Quilting
    Regency
    Retro
    Self Made Pattern
    Self-made Pattern
    Terminology
    Victorian
    Vintage

    Blogs I Read

    The Dreamstress
    Male Pattern Boldness
    ​
    Lilacs & Lace
    Tom of Holland
    Fit for a Queen
    Line of Selvage
    Mainely Menswear
    Bernadette Banner

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

    RSS Feed

Blog

Quilting

Clothing

About

Copyright Karen Roy
​© 2017-2022