Wales is famous for patchwork quilts. These are stitched together out of small pieces of fabric in shapes with straight edges like squares, oblongs, triangles and hexagons. They have been made for hundreds of years and are still made today.
Many quilts from Wales have geometrical designs that balance around the centre. This example from Ceredigion Museum has lines of symmetry through the centre – from top to bottom, from side to side and from corner to corner. If you held a mirror along those lines it would look just the same. This quilt is also rotationally symmetrical, which means that if you turned it through 90 degrees it would not change.
You can see many examples of quilts online at Amgueddfa Cymru. Try to decide where the lines of symmetry are in some of them.
Visit
Possible to visit:
- Ceredigion Museum
- Welsh Quilt Centre, Lampeter
- National Museum of History, St Fagans