Refraction

I felt like it was time for another op-art project.....something that gives the illusion of movement...in the sense of falling or being pulled in.

So I started playing around with Excel to create such a design.

Let's begin with a square...some random size and thickness.

Next, put another square (same thickness) inside of that; evenly spaced on all 4 sides.

Since it is exactly centered within the larger square, both diagonal lines go through all 4 corners of each square (respectively), and through the middle. No movement or illusion there.

Now...what if you offset the inner square? Slide it, on the diagonal down toward the right, and you get this:

The original top left - bottom right diagonal line still goes through all 4 corners and the middle, but the other diagonal line has now been "refracted"! (Like looking at a straw in a glass of water.) Each half now only goes through two of the squares' corners. 

Good so far.

Then, what if we make the bottom and right sides of the squares a little thinner? Maybe this will accentuate the "shift":

Indeed! And the illusion begins to take shape.

Obviously, it will take more than two squares to really give the desired effect! But if you notice in these simple models, there really are already FOUR squares! Two black and two white. Black and white will give the most contrast, so that makes the most sense here. 

But how many squares will I need?

I decided to make my actual piece 36" x 36". Big enough to really demonstrate the illusion, but not ridiculously large.

I played with different "thicknesses" (widths) for the black and white strips, for each of the top-left and bottom-right sets of fabs. Finally ended up with the thicker blacks being 1.25" (finished), the thicker whites being 1", and the thinner strips being 0.75" and 0.5" respectively. Oh....and a 1"x1" center black square.

And this results in 20 strips (alternating white and black) out from the center in all 4 directions.

So how to build this?

Every quilter, at some point early in their "career" has made a quilt using the Log Cabin Block pattern.

To do so, you start with a central square, then add strips around it (clockwise or counter). Every 4 strips gives you a bigger square (here the first one is made of a (center), a, b, b, and the first c), which is your block. It may be 4", 6", 8" and so on. Here is how that looks:

Usually, a quilt is made up of a lot of these blocks.

Here is a photo of the very first quilt I made (way back in 1995!) that shows how these blocks can be arranged:

You can see that each large block in this queen-size quilt is made from 4 smaller Log Cabin blocks. And each of those is half browns and half blues. There are so many ways to use this kind of block!

But I quickly realized that, by using this technique, I would really end up with ONE GIGANTIC LOG CABIN BLOCK!  What could be easier?  Just start in the center and keep adding on strip after strip after strip. The only real challenge was making sure that I used the right width for each black and white strip (only messed up once; had to rip two strips off and redo them). Note that the black fabric is solid (monotone), but the white is actually white dots on white.....this adds to the mind-bending illusion.

Here is the finished piece:

The illusion becomes more apparent if you stand farther back, but I get dizzy just looking at it from any distance!

I did minimal quilting: just black thread in the ditch of each black strip. Then, I mounted it on stretcher bars and it's ready to hang.

**This piece is for sale. Send me an email if you are interested.

Elle's Garden

Elle's parents initially requested a quilt with a golf theme. That threw me a bit.....how to do something like that for a baby / child?  But before I could get to it in my queue, they came back and said they had changed their mind! Whew!  Now they wanted something with flowers (Yay!). And even better, they found a pattern for one they liked.  The pattern is called "Fresh As A Daisy" and it can be found here.  

You can see that the pattern is written for a 5x5 version or a 4x4 version. They asked for the larger one, which is 60" x 64". So, this is one of the largest baby quilts I have made. 

They also asked for white flowers with a pink center on a tan background. Great!  We went to Quilter's Heaven and found the same fabric pattern in both the white and the tan!  Kind of swirly. Since the center squares did not need much fabric, I looked through my stash and found a perfect pink that also had swirls!

These were all very nice, but we also wanted some more colorful flowers for the back. Found a perfect fabric for that too!

Since the quilt was on the larger size, I decided to do it in sections. I have done this a number of times before, and even developed my own method for doing so. But it has been a while, so I went to the internet to see what was out there. I found a great video that shows NINE different ways to do this (although many of them are just variations on the same idea). I thought that #3 was the best. I tried doing it using scrap fabs to see just how it worked and ended up rewriting it into my own version. You can see that version here on my Quilting Tips blog.  

Thus, I pieced each flower, then built columns (you can see that the rows are offset, so I could not build it that way), then quilted each column. Then joined columns 1, 2, and 3.  Then did a set with columns 4 and 5. Finally, joined 1-3 and 4-5, which was easy to do as it is just a straight seam line and all the quilt bulk is outside of the machine's throat. 

The quilting is just ditch:  white threads around the petals and tan on the sashing strips (horizontal and vertical). 

Here it is:

 

...and the back:

As always, I wanted to come up with a good name for the quilt. We didn't like "Fresh As A Daisy" (meh) and kicked around a few other ideas, until it suddenly occurred to me "Elle's Garden"! Perfect. It was only when I was saving the photos and updating my quilt log (this is quilt #190!), that I noticed that I had made a quilt in 2012, for another niece, named "Dominique's Garden"!! That child is now 13 years old!  Wonder how much of that quilt is still around.  Maybe I'll make another "garden" quilt in 2038!!

Turtle Time

This is the 30th quilt commissioned by my friend Mari, and the first one for this family. 

The original idea was for something "beachy" with surfboards, because the family recently moved from Hawaii to Tampa.

After some further discussion, it morphed to "palm trees with whales or turtles".  I looked at a number of patterns, but couldn't find anything that worked. We went back and forth and then the parents actually found a pattern they liked and forwarded it to me! That rarely happens.

It had water and sand and turtles! Perfect!

The main pattern is made from 72 blocks (8 across by 9 down). Each block begins with a 6" square. Then, I used a quarter-circle template to cut each into 2 parts. By then arranging the quarter-circle part with the other "half" from another color, and sewing them together along the curved edge, I ended up with 4.5" two-toned blocks (plus the full-sized sand block in the bottom left). I used a number of batik colors to shade the waves across from deep water to shallow water to seaweed-water to sand.

Then the turtles. The pattern provided a template, which was the big turtle. I thought that making all the turtles this size would take up too much room, and also that having a variety of sizes would add more interest. So the middle 3 were scaled to 90%, and the little guy was at 85%. This also gave me the opportunity to use different fabrics to represent their life cycle. In this world, their shells, head and appendages get darker as they age and grow.

Each turtle is actually made of 6 pieces: the head, the body, and the 4 legs. The fabric was put on double-sided fusible webbing. Once the quilt top was complete, I arranged them as shown and fused them in place. But since this quilt will be used (a dragger instead of a hanger), and most certainly washed, I thought that they might start to fray and come off over time. So, I whipstitched them in place using a single strand of thread (each turtle took about an hour to do!).  If you zoom in on the above photo you can see this stitching.

Then the top was framed by more blue batiks, reinforcing the feeling of water.

For the back, I found a fabric with colorful turtles (perhaps a different species!).

 

You can see from this photo that the quilting is a simple ditch pattern. I followed each undulation with a matching color thread, switching colors at each curve. Thus, as usual, it is basically invisible on the front side.

Have fun at the beach, Miles!