The Pattern Block Pieces

This section describes the standard pattern block pieces, and some other pieces I use that are also interesting.

The standard pattern block pieces are shown in the following picture.

These are six pieces that come in the standard set of pattern blocks that you can buy at some toy or education stores. The pieces have the following properties:

Each piece has a side of length unit 1 (except the trapezoid, which has one side of unit 2).
Each angle is a multiple of 30 degrees.

These properties make it easy to combine pieces to create larger designs.

There are other shapes that have the same properties. Some examples of other types of pattern block pieces are shown in the next picture.

The top three are polygrams (stars) with unit sides and 30 degree points. These shapes are available in the set of tessel-gon stars from www.tessellations.com and are compatible with the set of pattern blocks. The three pointed star shows up in a lot of the patterns shown later.

The bottom two shapes are the dodecagon and a dodecagram with 30 degree points. The dodecagon is also available in a set of tessel-gons from www.tessellations.com and is compatible with the set of pattern blocks. The dodecagram is available in the set of tessel-gon stars.

There are other polygrams (10 total). It includes the first three, which cannot be made from the six original pieces, but the other 7 (including four dodecagrams, one shown above) can be made from the original 6 pieces.

All of the pieces shown above appear in designs later.

Back to How to Make Designs.