I love geology. Every student that has ever taken a geology 101 course should be familiar with the figure illustrating the layers of the earth: inner core, outer core, mantle, and crust. I remember that figure well, and decided to crochet a nesting earth layers model. After accepting the fact that it is not really practical to attempt to make this to scale, I am having fun with it. While planning the nesting earth layers model, I stumbled across a blog post for an “ideal crochet sphere” (click ideal sphere to check it out for yourself). The blog author used math (gotta love it) to derive a crochet pattern for an ideal sphere, and has patterns for multiple sizes available to download in a PDF. I am using those sphere crochet patterns (with a few minor changes) as the basis for my nesting earth model. I have included some photos of the progress below.
Inner core (yellow) and outer core (orange)
Inner core and outer core nested together
The mantle (red) is beginning to take shape!
I will add updates for this project as it progresses. Stay tuned! Feel free to leave comments or questions below.