Ball making is a tedious, repetitive, but ultimately meditative task once you have the stitches down. It also exercises creativity in three-dimensional space which made me a far better sewer and planner.

I experimented with how certain patterns on one face might look when assembled as a complete ball and decided on version 4, the Star Ball.

Material Sourcing and Panel Cutting

I completed this project using scrap leather that a classmate sourced from their family. The pieces were not regular shapes and thus had to be planned around before cutting. I traced the outline in OnShape and used this as the boundary when placing all thirty panels.

Initial Inspirations

Rhombic Triacontahedron

I then exported the resulting drawing as a .dxf file and uploaded this to CorelDraw and UCP. Using this software, I cut the faces and their stitch holes with a laser cutter. After I had all panels cut, I stitched the cross-pattern into every face as specified in the plan above.

Early Ideation and CAD Mockups

Create 30 rhombic panels and stitch the X-shaped detail into the center of the panels to create the star lines when the ball is fully stitched. My pattern stitching became more efficient over time and looks different to the pattern on the right image in later panels.

I didn’t want my soccer ball to be “standard” by any means, so I looked for a spherical pattern beyond the traditional 12 pentagon 20 hexagon design. I found that the rhombic triacontahedron is a convex polyhedron made of 30 rhombic faces. These faces have short and long diagonals whose ratio is equal to the golden ratio.

Finally, I began to stitch the panels together into a ball shape until they were spherical. I still need to place the ball bladder but temporarily used shirts to stuff the leather shell and give it some shape, hence the current lumpiness of the final ball.