Each of these three scarves represents a mathematical curiosity known as a Dragon Curve.

A Dragon Curve is a space-filling curve which can be generated by folding a strip of paper many times. (If you want to know more about the mathematics involved, we have a booklet called Dragonometry)

There are different ‘orders’ of dragons, which relate to how many times the paper has been folded.

The scarves show what happens when you make dragons with 4, 5 or 6 folds. It can be seen from the photograph that the stripes in the first of these are also in the other two, with extra stripes in between.

The ‘folds’ are applied to the basic scarf with surface crochet. The two colours represent ‘in’ and ‘out’ folds.

These are nice scarves to wear - and fun to play with. You don’t need to make all three. As they all start in the same way you could make the simplest first then decide later whether to make it more complex.

A really fun thing is that no matter how many times you fold the scarves in half you always get alternate coloured stripes piled up on top of each other.

We also have a wall-hanging, called Chromatic Scale, which represents several orders of dragons simultaneously.

The pattern is also available in Mufflermatics an ebook of mathematical scarves and shawls.