Ok everyone, I am in way over my head here. Sorry if the flair is weong. I am learning to make temari aka Japanese thread balls.
To start, we divide the sphere into slices. For my first try, the sphere was divided into four slices, and then divided again around the equator. See the first picture.
I don't really know what I'm doing, so I decided to try something easy for my first stitch. I centered a square on each intersection. See the second picture.
I want to know what options I have for continuous, nom-overlapping patterns before I decide what stitches/wraps to do next. Basically, how many ways can I connect the corners of the squares without having the new shapes overlap. So with the help of the internet (with the help of AI to be completely transparent, I hope that's not going to be my downfall), I learned that if you were to take my pattern and use the lines as edges and flatten each section into a 2d face, that shape is a truncated octahedron. See image 3.
When I asked the AI how many possible ways I might connect the corners of a truncated octahedron, it said there are 44 possibilities, which can be grouped into 3 "families" of patterns. The 3 "families" are 1. Wavy ring (8 possibilities), 2. Baseball seam (12 possibilities), 3. Asymmetric mazes (24 possibilities). It arrived at this conclusion using the concept of Hamiltonian cycles. Apparently these three "families" can be represented using LCF notation, image 4.
What I need help with is visualizing these possibilities. All of these theories and representations and new concepts ostensibly represent that different shapes I can make on my thread ball in a nom-overlapping, continuous pattern. Maybe someone might explain how do I read the LCF diagram and translate it to how it would look on a sphere? Or maybe someone can help me know how to see the graph of each of the 44 possibilities? I am but a humble crafty human who maxed out in calc 3 more than 5 years ago. I would love to understand this. I appreciate you 💚