When I was a young boy, there was an art toy available called Spirograph. It was a plastic bracket with geared circles cut out of it. The plastic bracket was accompanied by plastic gears with holes in them to hold pens in place. Each gear piece had a different shape or size.
The purpose of the Spirograph set was to create flowers out if geometric repeating shapes. I called them Spirograph flowers but they actually had a technical name that I can't recall.
To create the so called Spirograph flowers, you would choose a gear piece and place it in the nested gear circle. You would then place a pen in a hole on the gear piece and then use the pen to turn the gear around. You would then create two rotations on a line because the gear piece would go around the nested gear hole and it would rotate on it's axis at the same time.
At any point you could remove the pen and place a different color or change the hole that the pen sits or change the gear piece. You could also colour in some of the spaces in the pattern and the combination of colours is unlimited. If you made many changes to the flower then the chances are that you had created something very unique. Every kid and adult that had a Spirograph set wanted to create a one of a kind outstanding spirograph flower.
I think there are different sets available now and some of them are very sophisticated with many brackets and many gear pieces.
