Nessie tiles

These abstract, fluid shapes first made us think of water and waves. We based on our design on a parallelogram. Can you see the connection? After we chose the colors, our son-in-law Sean suggested they looked like sea serpents. So we called this shape Nessie. Nessies allow for a remarkable variety of patterns.

Below is another example. Notice that if you look at any particular point in this pattern, there are other points elsewhere that looks exactly the same. This means we could shift (or translate) the pattern in a way that after the shift/translation, it looks the same. Such a translation is called a symmetry. If the pattern allows shifts in more than one direction, we say it is a wallpaper pattern.

Here's a more complex wallpaper pattern…

Nessie also allows radial symmetries: patterns that are preserved by partial rotation…