The votes are in!

It looks like the voting has settled, and the winner is.....

Feynman Lives!

I'm working to finish up the applique of the two rivers on your choice from the last challenge poll, then it will be ready to quilt.  Gotta figure out that quilting scheme soon!  (A friend is here, getting acquainted with Molly (my longarm) as she learns to quilt.   "Between Two Rivers" might take awhile to quilt, so we'll see what the training schedule is going to be.  That's a reprieve, right?  I have more time to figure out the quilting, and get started on Feynman.  :-)

I'll post an update on Between Two Rivers soon.

Getting to Work (Part II)!

The second half of the 12 week Design Challenge is over, and it's time for you to tell me which of the weekly designs you'd like me to work on first.   I've chosen the design I like best from each week's concepts, and your votes will decide where I start.  (I'm still making progress on "Between Two Rivers," which should be ready for quilting soon.  Which means, I suppose, that I have to settle on a quilting scheme.)

Anyway, back to this half of the challenge.  You can vote for your choice on this survey/poll, which shows the choices, but I'm reviewing your choices here, as well.   (Disclaimer:  Colors may change, on any of these, when they are actually made.)

1. Life is Chocolate
What can I say?

2. Feynman Lives
Perhaps not as true to a Feynman diagram as some of the others, it still retains a tiny bit of the spirit of them.

3. Elemental
All good choices, as I liked them all.  I had to choose one.

4. Inca
I liked all my choices, but this was still in keeping with the original, beautiful Inca counting device.

5. Knife Skills
I will probably do "Diced," anyway, at some point (I'm thinking hand-dyed cottons) so Julienned was my choice for your choosing.

6. Window on Wings
This was a tough choice, but in the end this is the one from last week that would be most different for me to try.

Please help with your vote! (You surprised me last time.)   Thanks for your input!  Here's the link again:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HOarQc7bBI2UT00SQN2Jd90ZbZoDDks-8pFCP6wqgbo/viewform?usp=send_form

Design Challenge Week #12 Results

It's the 12th and final week (for now) of my Design Challenge, as I'll be taking a break before my next challenge.  (I think the next will be something to do with architectural details.)  I have plenty of designs to make into quilts, and in the next week or so I'll be posting a poll that will let you choose which of the most recent 6 designs you would like me to work on first.  Or, next--I'm making progress on the previous hexdesign poll.  (The background is all finished, I've chosen the blue for the rivers and have actually created them, and now I have to work out the curve that I want.)

So, back to this week, which revolves around photos of moths that my sister, Rita, sent me.  There are many beautiful and intriguing patterns on the wings but one of my favorites, and the one I chose, has a pattern of straight, black lines on a beige wing.   It reminded me very  much of improvisational piecing, though the patterns on the two wings mirrored each other, which is less likely to happen on an improvisationally pieced quilt.

Because the moth's wings were triangular in shape, I first "pieced" some black bars into triangles. following the pattern on the moth's wings (to some extent).  Not quite what I wanted.

I made some more, and combined them, again following somewhat the shape of the moth with its wings extended.  Still didn't do much for me.

How about some color?   No, that's not it, either.

Then I tried circles.  You know me--and circles and bars!

I tried it with colors, and like that rather better.

I tried it with the circles having a different background from the main field.

I tried it with the main field a different color than the circles.

The circle design is my favorite thus far but, though I promised myself I wouldn't worry about construction while I'm designing, I'm worrying about how to get a good, crisp appliqued circle with those bars cutting across the edges at odd angles.  (Hmm.  Reverse applique might be a possibility.)


Then, going back to my fascination with weaving, I tried straight, woven bars in a square "window."  (Yes, at this point I abandoned the improvisational piecing aspect.  The wings were just an inspiration, as a jumping-off point.)  Just one window was too plain, and didn't really show off the weaving effect as much as it might, so I started combining windows, lining them up so the warp threads and one weft thread would tie them together.  Not bad; I like this one, also.  I'd want to play around with the number of windows, and how to place them.

I can't leave a design without trying some other effects. What if I stretched the windows, vertically and horizontally, and again match up warp and weft threads, as I can.

I'm not certain which I like better--one of the circle designs, or the first woven pattern.   I'll ponder that, as I need to make a decision before I post your 6 choices for the poll!

Which do YOU like best?

Design Challenge Week #11: Results

This week's challenge:  design a quilt around the kitchen, specifically knife skills.

My knife skills are not in the perfection category, but I still have all my fingers.  (I did lose the veriest little bit of the tip of one finger, but that was a rotary cutter accident, not a knife crisis.)

My first thought was dicing: lots of nice, little squares.   If I were really good with knife skills the dice would be even and consistent in size.  However, my diced is dicey.  (Besides, an even dice in a quilt would just be squares of the same size and, while I love postage stamp quilts, that wouldn't meet my objectives here.)

I'm picturing many colors of hand-dyed fabric.  I guess it would be a diced salad, with LOTS of different ingredients.

A cutting board with piles of dice:

Next up in knife skills is slicing; think "red onions."   Here we have all sorts of choices, changing sizes and colors, and arrangements.  I started with "rings" that are really discs with red onion rims.

Actual onion rings could also be grouped, stacked, whatever.

Just for fun, stacking closely creates a sort of Slinky effect.

And changing colors in a different kind of stack makes for a bit of an optical illusion.

The final knife skill for the challenge is cutting julienne strips.  (This one was the most fun, to be honest.)  Think carrot strips.

It's easy to make a pinwheel from the strips.

But, in the end, I like the overlap design the most:

I tried it in a block arrangement but it was pretty blah, and didn't look at all right.  So, I returned to my favorite vertical strip, which I would offset from the center, placing it at about 1/3 the width of the background.

Oh, and I was shifting the strip sets around, I ended up with something that looked like an old-fashioned camera case (with the "bellows" look), so I added some sliced rings.  Just for fun.

Because fun is what it's all about, right?

Design Challenge Week #10: Results

This week's challenge is based on a photo in an article about ancient Inca calculating devices. My brother sent me the link; it's the first photo on the page.

As a spinner, I was interested in the concept of the fiber and knots, and a quilt that combines both quilting and spun threads/yarn is a possibility that holds some considerable interest.  That's an exploration for another day.

Today I played with designs that are just fabric, and which are pretty close to the look of the original piece.  You could easily deconstruct it and play with individual strands and knots, for example but the piece as a whole is so compelling as a design that stuck pretty closely to that design.

There are a number of choices for a background; it could be a plain, solid piece of fabric or a pieced background in very subtle shades of natural whites and tans.  As it's a calculating device, I think I would do it in small(ish) squares, to add an additional layer of texture.

Now, on to the focus piece.  I thought about making the "strings" all the same length, but it wasn't at all the look I wanted.   My first concept used varying lengths, but the same width. However, hand-spun fibers are never exactly, perfectly even (well, mine aren't!) so I tried varying the width of the strips and liked that much better.

I wanted more variety of color, still using the brown palette.

Actually, I like that but I wanted to represent some knots in the strings and, of course, I decided to use small circles.

One per strand was good, but what would it look like with more than one knot on some of the strands?  I varied the color of the knots a bit which wouldn't be strictly accurate, as the knots on any one strand would be the same color as the strand of which it was made, but I'm invoking artistic license here.

Just to see what would happen, I did a little bit of duplicating and juggling, to create a few other designs with multiples.  They look fine, but I think I might like the single representation the best.

In the end, the piece might end up with more strands and more--or fewer--knots.  Another quilt might have strands from hand-spun fibers and actual knots, or perhaps wooden beads as the knots.

Design Week #9: Results

This week my challenge was to design a quilt around an architectural element or detail. I have been gathering photos of interesting details for some time and decided it was time to buckle down and do something with them.


The element I chose was this hinge on a door at my hairdresser's shop.   I don't know how many times I must have passed this in the years I've been going to Valerie's shop, but one day a few months I finally saw it.  Wow!  Don't you love this sort of attention to detail?  I'm absolutely in love with it. (It seems like it must be something from Craftsman days?)


First, I deconstructed it and started playing with just the bars.  (Yes, perhaps you noticed that the hinge is full of my favorite design elements:  bars and circles.)   As a weaver, I especially appreciate the woven effect.   Honestly, I don't think this would be a bad quilt (or block) on its own.

It creates an interesting effect if you put them side by side....

or stack them.

As I was doing the copying and pasting for the side-by-side, the copies layered themselves on top of each other in rather intriguing patterns, too.

 

Since I like circles, I wanted to introduce them into the design.  Stylizing the design on the hinge just a bit:

Or, shifting things a bit more:

The original design is gorgeous itself, so a design that is quite close to the original, but with just a touch of stylizing to include the screws, was definitely called for.

I think my favorite, though, is more stylized,

and stacks a few of the design on top of each other, for a vertical look on a quilt.  This one might well be on my design wall in the not-too-distant future.

Which is your favorite?   Do you have a favorite architectural feature or element that might be a quilt design?

Design Challenge Week #8 Results

My brother provided the challenge for this week:  Feynman Diagrams.  I had to do a bit of research because, while I'm familiar with Dr. Feynman, I wasn't as familiar with his diagrams.  Mike sent me a link to an  article about an exhibit at FermiLab of Feynman Diagram art rendered in steel tubing.  Quite cool.

The diagrams are, as near as I can make out, about diagramming atomic/subatomic particles' movements and interactions.   It was quite a different topic but a challenge isn't a challenge unless it's a challenge, and I spent quite some time with it this week.  I found that it would be easy to spend a great deal more time with it, but here are some ideas I played with.   I don't know if my brother will laugh, cry, shake his head, or bang his head against the desk when he sees them, but art is supposed to inspire emotion and discussion, right?

It wouldn't be difficult to do a quilt with pretty literal interpretation of the diagrams, and I might do one for Mike--if he sends me some of his favorites. (It occurs to me that it might be fun to do the diagrams in white, on a black background--chalk on slate blackboard.  Old school, I know, but surely Feynman used old-fashioned blackboards in the course of his career and his lectures.)

It could be sylized just a bit, and repeated:

The challenge is to create designs inspired by the topic, not necessarily literal representation, though, so as I was reading a post with "rules" for constructing the diagrams, I thought about the pieces   that seemed to go into them.  In the case of this particular post, there were squiggly lines and straight lines with arrows:  electrons and positrons going in, electrons and positrons going out, with the squiggly lines being where some sort of "magic happens" in the equation.  (Sorry, any physicists who are reading this; I'm going to claim artistic license, even in my understanding of the diagrams!)   Anyway, back to the pieces.  What if you had a toolbox of the pieces or components of the diagrams, sorted and lined up?  That would be more of a "block-y" kind of quilt.

To make something more traditionally "quilty" I used classic quilt piece shapes to construct squiggly lines (you CAN see that in the staggered bands, right?) and triangles for the arrowed lines.   Yes, you Feynman fans may notice that I have particles going in and never coming out.  I don't know for certain, but I suspect that's a serious problem in the physics world.

 I rather like vertical columns of design, so you could set it on its end, too.

Traditional quilts often feature repetition--repeated shapes or blocks--and several of these stylized diagrams make for a rather interesting composition.  It is probably way beyond "approximation" and unless you knew it was a stylized Feynman Diagram your brain wouldn't make that leap but, hey; it's an artistic interpretation inspired by the diagrams.

At some point in the series of posts about diagrams that I was reading, color was introduced.  Hurrah!  Something else to play with.  (The color was a quark thing, I think; different flavors of quarks can be represented with different colors?  Feynman is probably turning in his grave now, and physicists everywhere are developing serious headaches.)  At least I've corrected the problem with particles going in but not coming out.

Expanding my horizons on the shapes of diagrams I found a few more designs that I liked.   You could do a series of improvisationally pieced triangles, with some bias strips for the squiggly lines.  Or, you could stylize them and create more traditional triangles with squiggly lines.

Hexagons are a very popular shape for quilters, especially of late.  I like the hexagon with squiggly lines. It looks a bit like biology meets physics, doesn't it?  (Sorry, I can't tell you what this particular diagrams represents, in terms of particles.)  And goodness knows, I have enough rulers and tools for making hexagons.

 How about a Fractal Feynman?   Hexagon diagrams making up a hexagon?  (OK, it's stretching it to call that a fractal but I'm invoking artistic license and naming again.)

Thinking about the steel tubing art started me thinking about possibilities with more dimension.  I have, for some time, been planning a quilt (or series) that uses quilted strips that are twisted; an example is below.   I think that has potential for a more dimensional rendering of the squiggly lines.

The hexagons could even have more dimension, if I made them separately, using the Hickory Nut ruler. (See my post about Crazy Hexies.)   The center would be plain, rather than the crazy quilting.   Although.....now that I think about it, you could embroider some Feynman diagrams in the middle of each one.   Hmmm.

Or, I could piece together some hexies with plainer backgrounds, and then sew some dimensional twisted pieces over the top of them, for yet another dimensional quilt, albeit it one that is quite far from the original design inspiration.   Hmmm, again...

Feynman is probably laughing in his physics lab in the sky, Mike is probably laughing in a hysterical sort of way, and I am smiling because this was quite fun.   There are many more ideas floating around in my head than I've had time to play with this week and that's the whole point of the Challenge.   Who knows what next week will hold!

This challenge just reminded me of a quilt made for Mike years ago.  The family was talking about Penrose tiling at Christmas one year and we thought it might make an interesting quilt.  My brothers headed off to the library to get some articles about it, Mary Kay headed in to Dad's computer to write the code for a program that would generate diagrams, and Rita and I talked about color, fabric, etc. (Poor Mom was trying to get us to sit down to dinner.  I think her children were quite a strain on her, some days!)  Penrose tiling uses just two shapes, and you have to place them correctly to get them to all fit together.  If you  mess up with one, it throws off every other piece placement from that point out. (You build from the center--or, at least I did.)  I made plenty of mistakes as I was laying it out on the design wall, and I must have reset pieces at least 50 times.   I cut each piece by hand, around templates (this was pre-rotary cutter and rulers),  pieced it by hand, and hand quilted it.  I also used some beads, though you can't see them very well in this photo.    Nowaways, we have many more color options in fabrics and I could probably do more gradation in the darks, but I still rather like this quilt.