Hitome's Garden

Every line has just two ways to go, and the walls they make decide which flowers end up sharing a bed.

The Hitome's Garden board

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Grades
2–6
Subjects
Logic, Shapes & Space
Kind
Puzzle
Cost
Free, no account, no ads

What it is

Hitomezashi is a Japanese running stitch — over, under, over, under. Here every line of the cloth is sewn that way, and each line has only two ways to start. The stitches that show become walls, the walls cut the cloth into beds, and every bed has to end up holding flowers of exactly one kind.

The rules

Sew flowers in their beds.

A bare cloth of sunflowers. One line is sewn: a stitch, a skip, a stitch, a skip. Then the same line is sewn the other way round, and the stitches land on the squares that were skipped.
Each line sews in an on-off pattern.
Line by line the cloth is sewn, and the threads cut it into beds. Each bed takes its own soft colour, and by the end every sunflower has one to itself.
The visible part helps make the edges of a bed.
A sewn cloth with one bed left with no flower in it, marked wrong. A thread moves and that bed is filled, but now a daisy and a tulip are sharing a bed, and the two of them are ringed. One more thread, and every bed holds one kind of flower of its own.
Every bed needs a flower, but only one kind of flower.

What it gives you to practise

Each line is a single choice between two options, and the finished picture is the consequence of all those choices together — which is what makes the board reasonable rather than searchable. The sunflower is the solitary one and needs a bed to itself; every other kind gathers, so all the tulips share one bed and all the poppies share another. Working out which line must start which way, and being able to say why, is the whole puzzle.

In a classroom

Gordon Hamilton, MathPickle. Hitomezashi is worth five minutes on its own before the puzzle: the same over-under rule on squared paper draws the same patterns by hand, with nothing to solve.

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The whole puzzle at one address, with every board in it. Whoever opens it stays inside it, and their progress stays in their own browser.

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Near it on the shelf