For relaxation I love to do the New York Times crosswords. I have a yearly subscription and use the Crosswords app on my android tablet. After/if I finish I read Rex Parker’s blog as he provides a daily (sometimes biting) critique. They get published at 9pm the day before publication date, so doing them before I head to bed puts me in a relaxed state.
Monday through about Thursday, that is. Monday is the easiest and they get progressively harder through the week. Saturday is beyond me, and I will sneak a peek at Rex’s column to see if he gives the Sunday (which is large) an ‘easy’ mark. Monday-Thursday almost always have a theme, or some trick to them that hopefully results in an ‘aha’ moment when the puzzle makes sense.
National PI day is March 14 (or 3.14.year). But it wasn’t until a week or two later that a PI-themed puzzle was published. Sometimes the Thursday puzzles are a rebus where one square can have multiple letters in it. It this year’s case (spoiler alert) some squares contained the letters “PI” and the answers were like the TV show “Magnum PI” crossed with the film “Life of PI”.
Anyway that gave me the inspiration to create the PI symbol with intarsia technique. For the PI digits a simple Google search found a website with PI calculated to the millionth digit. I was hesitant about attempting a photo transfer since my PI symbol was looking pretty good, so I opted to print the digits on office paper and encase in encaustic. A resit topcoat is added.
I’m going to be doing a larger version of this, maybe adding in some graphics with PI-related equations.