<h3> Snowflake Geometry</h3>

To get in the festive mood, I like to watch old Christmas cooking shows. Fanny Cradock Cooks Christmas, a couple of Nigellas, something with Ruth Goodman recreating Christmases past... You get the picture. I also watch a handful of those OTT American "Holiday Baking" shows. This year there was a challenge to make snowflake cookies. Ooooh! Snowflakes. I sat up a little straighter waiting to see what I could learn from "America's best bakers."

What I learned was that while baking might be their forte, geometry wasn't. I think only one of them managed to create a six pointed snowflake design. Most were eight pointed.

Now I get that doing anything under pressure is tough and not everyone is as snowflake obsessed as me, or had such good maths' teachers, so I figured be part of the solution, not part of the problem. To that end, here is a little "how to" construct a regular (all sides the same length) hexagon.

The easiest way to do this is with a pair of compasses. Remember those from school maths' lessons? Well go rummage through the junk drawer, or raid your kid's pencil case and draw yourself a circle. Remember the circle you draw will be twice as wide as the gap between pointy end and pencil tip. That width is the radius of your circle (the distance from centre to circle edge). The size of your circle will determine the size of your hexagon.

Once you've drawn a circle stab it with the pointy end of your compass. It doesn't matter where, just jab it somewhere on the circle. Keep the compasses open the same amount as when you drew the circle. Now draw a little bit of a circle (an arc) crossing the original line. Where the arc and circle cross over, stab that place and repeat, until you have six arcs crossing the main circle. If you then join up those six points then voila - you've constructed a regular hexagon.

Of course the contestants in the baking show probably didn't have a handy set of compasses, so what could they have done? The eagle eyed among you will have spotted that each of the arcs (or tick marks) around the edge of the circle are one radius apart.

So grab a circular cookie cutter (or biscuit/pastry cutter if you prefer)and draw around it. Now you have a circle. Cut it out. Fold it in half. Cut along the fold. Now you have a semi-circle. Fold that in half. Now you have a quarter of a circle, but more importantly each straight edge of the quarter is the length of the radius. Draw around your cutter again and now you can use the edge of your quarter circle to mark where the tick marks go.

Once you have your hexagon, join the opposite corners and you have the basic structure for your snowflake.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. If you've been inspired to create something hexagon based, or have some snowflake inspired crafts of your own then do share them.