Quilting and Math

We’ve all heard about the connection between mathematics and music, and much of my life has been proof of this. I never thought of myself as much of a visual artist, but mathematics has been the basis of much of my enjoyment of cross-stitch, needlepoint, crochet, knitting and quilting.

During COVID, this interest blossomed. I began working with numerical sequences as well as exploration of the golden ratio. That resulted last spring in a quilt that features a logarithmic wave on one side, and sets of golden ratio “rectangles” on the reverse:

I designed the golden ratio side, and my son helped me with a table of logarithmic values in Excel, to make the best use of one “jelly roll” of print fabric to fit a Queen-size quilt. I tried out both “walking foot” machine quilting for the stripes and long curves on the logarithmic side, and “free motion quilting” for the spirals through the golden ratios. I love having a reversible quilt, and it’s kept me warm all winter with its wool batting.

My next challenge was to combine my daughter’s love of Fibonacci sequences with her social justice advocacy. I had two “jelly rolls” to work with, with 22 rainbow colours. And here’s the result:

This quilt was machine pieced and then hand-quilted. I could have chosen to machine quilt, since the quilting is very simple “stitch in the ditch”, but I needed the meditative process this spring as to balance out my long days online as Principal. As the weather became warmer it was more difficult to sit under the quilt, so it was July before I was able to bind and complete.

Yesterday I went looking for more challenges, but was hoping for something that wouldn’t take months to complete. I have enjoyed playing with “disappearing” patterns, but had not actually constructed any yet. This is a technique of piecing a simple square, and then cutting it into quarters or ninths, and sewing it together with the pieces rotated. So I tried out the “disappearing hourglass” pattern. You create it by sewing all the way around a pair of squares, cutting them on the diagonal, resewing them into an hourglass shape, and then cutting again into nine-patches.

What do you think?

These were both machine pieced and quilted, so they worked up quickly, and make a bright pillow for my sunroom. They each began with a 10″ square from a “layer cake”, so I have 40 more possible “disappearing” squares to construct. If I can find enough background fabric for the contrast to these wonderful Kaffe Fassett prints I might just make this my next “mathematical” quilt.