Thanks to all of you who have been following Fractal Week! Today I’ll show you how to make a 3D Sierpinski triangle made from nothing but toothpicks and mini-marshmallows! Plus we have a comic from guest artist Brian Buckley!
First stage, base of one of the four pyramids that make up the full size triangle. Our cat Dax is already curious.
Build pyramids in the three corners, leaving the middle open. Some left-over fuel to the left.
A complete mini-pyramid. The full size pyramid is made up of four of these, three for the base and one on the top. We built the base a few days ahead of time allowing it time to harden. (The Little Red Haired Girl also suggested reinforcing it with hairspray which seems to have done a good job).
The final product with one of my wife’s birthday gifts to me guiding the final construction.
View from one side, as you can see the whole middle section is removed, as it would be in the real triangle. It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Fractals with parts removed are not the most stable, hence why we reinforced it.
Most 3D Sierpinski’s I’ve seen are computer generated and have four sides. I felt this wouldn’t work for our shape for two reasons. One triangles, even ones with parts removed are stronger than squares. And two, this shape has a Sierpinski triangle on all sides, even the base.
Several hundred toothpicks and about half a bag of mini-marshmallows went into the construction of this fractal (some to fuel the builder).
The view from inside.
Friend of the blog Brian Buckley was kind enough to draw another “versus” picture for this week.
Have a great weekend, we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.
The Fractals You Can Draw posts are collected in ebook form, available now on Amazon.
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 
That Sierpinski Pyramid looks delicious!