TRUST YOUR HEART

"Trust Your Heart To Lead You Home" is a triptych carved on cherry wood panels. This mosaic mock-up is a variation on the third panel, and is my fourth effort at a feasible cyclocentric mosaic in tile. It contains samples of  five polygons not commonly seen in tile in five networks similarly underused, these polygons have all been test cut (with diamond tools) in the sizes necessary to produce this image for a back-splash 41 5/8 in x 87 in.  

These examples represent the smallest pieces I was able to cut consistently. Quite a number of them just broke from the strain, and more than a few were backwards (the wiggle has a direction). It wasn't until later that I realized those backwards pieces were the key to an even odder group of symmetries. I was moving them around wondering just how one might join lefty wiggles to righty ones. I had to flip some over because so far I had no place for out of phase pieces. That was before I discovered "phase flip, side slip".
Applied to the triple wiggle triangle window, these phase flipped triangles don't just wiggle they crawl. The effect on the other cyclocentric polyhedra is no less pronounced.

 

first posted on LinkedIn Dec10,2015

Chicken Says

Ok, Chicken says, "It's time to wrap it up." This project's been done, and the next one's well on it's way. So here's a couple of quick tips on how the quilting layout went.

At first I was a bit at a loss for what might be useful, but after trying a bunch of different templates it came down to two. The first one was just to locate the intersections.

  The other template was only for laying out

 the fishes. While the chalk marks were fragile,  with a few different colors of chalk to make the new marks easier to identify it went pretty smoothly, if slowly.









 I realize that  people who sew much don't need many hints, so I'm taking a break and letting Chicken finish this up.

Chicken was in no way inconvenienced, (He likes the cape).

 



 

Quilting Single Wiggle Square BabyBlanket

Everything about this quilt was more straightforward than the last one. No surprise, this one was tested better and sewed over and over till it worked reasonably well. Both the corners and the curvy joins (slightly visible on each edge) required ripping out and resewing several times to work. There was another surprise when it came time to make the back. Using the template for the border as a guide it wasn't too challenging to make a pattern the size the field should have been.

 The template for the back was made to equal the six square width of the field. The squares of the field were cut out with a quarter inch tab all around. After sewing, the whole field had drawn up enough to hide about a quarter of an inch under the template for the back. So instead of adding a quarter inch for a sewing tab when I cut it out, I trimmed off a quarter inch all the way around.

  Looking closely you can find the curvy joins and fancy corners in the picture on the right. The joins hid better than the corners, but it all worked well enough to use it again.                        

After batting, pinning, and basting shut the whole thing shut, it got it's batting secured at the edge and shaken ever which way. Laying flat it was safety pinned around the border checking to be sure front and back were lined up. The edge of the border was then hand sewed, then machine sewed from the top along with the rest of the wiggly squares.

The resulting slight stagger (mostly less than an eighth of an inch) bugged me some, but I'd do it again.

Ok baby-steps, that's a wrap.

CYCLOCENTRIC SINGLE WIGGLE SQUARE-BEGINNINGS

I've been looking forward to making something with Single Wiggle Squares for a while now. Because this network is most easily generated by a grid of regular squares I tend to think of it as a fourfold network. This network generates circles of four fishes surrounding flower like figures sharing fishes with the four surrounding circles. Quilting this pattern is accomplished with pairs of wavy lines running two directions. Once again the colored pencils allowed me to change colors instead of erasing my error. This was my third poster paper sheet of this network. In the end I filled the whole sheet and then some making patterns for the back and border, cutting and taping as necessary.

Instead of bigger squares with the full quilting everywhere, I made them as small as I felt would be workable on the sewing machine. Outlining each piece
(single wiggle squares this time) and filling the half a square wide border plus a half square of each outside square in the field (center of wiggly squares).

I went through enough weirdness with odd fabrics in my first few projects. This time, it's all calico and gingham. If I counted right there are 13 kinds of calico and 2 kinds of gingham. It would have been simpler to make the whole back and border one piece. Instead I wanted to give the synced up front to back border one more try, with the quilting uniting the simplified center field with the barely marked, fully quilted border. Ideally, every fabric join should fall under a wiggly line of quilting.

 There were four of these made of gingham sewn together to make the frame/border, but first there were several traced on bakers parchment, cut out, folded up and test fitted around the field to make sure they'd fit. Several didn't fit, but eventually the corrections yielded the one below which led to what is probably the correct pattern at left. Baker's parchment is weird stuff. It's fairly transparent, but it won't hold tape or glue-stick worth a damn. It was however always in the kitchen and cheaper than vellum or some other tracing paper.

IF NOT FOR TEDI-CAM, POTHOLDER

If not for Tedi-Cam, well it's all there on the potholder. These images are both from my book "My First Hundred Teefes", so far published only on Kindle ( Except for 19 copies). They like all the images in the book were black and white line drawings.

The "Hyah" baby blanket didn't make it this time. So for now this potholder is on the short list of "My First Hundred Teefes" ephemera.

 I hope one day to get some better pictures but for now I'm just glad I got it finished and under the care of Dr Mo.

FIRST DOUBLE WIGGLE SIMPLIFIED BABY BLANKET MAILED

The Cyclocentric Double Wiggle Triangle Simplified baby blanket, to be more precise, is completed. Quilted, hand washed, and hanging to dry in the sun, seems to me to have an extra wide border. Flaws and all, I'm pleased enough with it that I've already begun plans for the next "simplified" test. It looks a little dark, it would it's still damp. I was still a little shy about this one. Even though my front to back border matching method wasn't great this time, I hope to get it eventually. It is proof of concept. I only got a few pictures of it, but there's time it stayed in the family.

I'm sure it'll be more opaque when it's dry. As it is it looks almost stained glass like from some angles.

Cyclocentric Single Wiggle Triangle Baby Blanket

I may always be a bit behind with my articles. Fortunately I still have some pretty good pictures of this one, even though I've done two more since then. Recent experiments using only wiggly lines in the border (except the outside edge) with varying density and complexity of the quilting, have led to more descriptive names. For instance, since this blanket's Cyclocentric polygons are bounded by straight lines out to the edge, I would refer to it, and the larger version with a similar treatment, as "primitive". That would make this a Cyclocentric Single Wiggle Triangle Primitive baby blanket.

                                               

The quilting itself was a three-fold pattern where

pairs of wavy lines going in three directions produced

 all the fishes and circles.

This more organized approach was a lot less
challenging and neater.   

The corner folding method was carried over from the Single

Wiggle Triangle Primitive blanket that came just before it.

I really liked the pleaty way I folded the corners to make

them one piece. Unfortunately, none of the templates survived. 

DOUBLE WIGGLE Not So Simplified

 As a hedge against further shrinkage incidents, I made this baby blanket test quilt somewhat larger. Good thing too as my nephew is growing faster than I'm sewing. That's not as bad as it seems. This quilt is an experimental design thjat went beyond my expertise. While the topside looks interesting-good, even a cursory examination of the back reveals that rounding the edge with the border has stumbled somewhere. Perhaps a clear chalk line to show the fold location might have helped. Somehow the backside drifted, so the border's a bummer on the back. Grow fast Ivan, when it's a wall hanging, the back won't show.

This quilt is called "Double Wiggle Simplified" because the field (center of wiggly triangles) isn't showing the full threefold circular net. The plan was to quilt on the simplified net in the field and surround it with a border of the complete net of circles of fishes.

The drift debacle was somewhat disheartening. Fortunately I started the quilting by chalking the full net for one direction in one corner and stitched it before I got bummed out. Now even though the full effect of the two nets in one is blunted by the drift on the back, I've got one corner already set up for the full net test.

  The other three corners have only the simplified net, and depending on the test, they may stay that way.

It's an oddball, but even if it's the only one I do, I'm glad I got to see a quilt in this pattern.

Six Lines Shy

I admit it, I'm loafin on tha fishes. Though it's probably just as well. I've been sewing every day for six weeks now. Building up to about six or so hours a day, and I'm still short most of six "layers" (sets of wiggly lines about four inches apart, all the way across the quilt in six separate directions) of stitches. Don't get me wrong, I love the threefold-fishy network, its's possibly the best quilting pattern my entry level skills and sewing machine can manage. But dam, that's a lot of wiggly lines.
 Besides, my quality control was weak-ish. As demonstrated by the area of tiny red ties that delineate a repaired ripple that required repairs in lots of stitch rows to chase down and flatten. In fact it was several times as large as the one I missed completely (pale green, top center) till this picture was in Photoshop being re-sized and saved for the web. So, guess I dodged a few more repairs anyway. I can save five or six layers of repairs by taking care of this one before I finish the last six layers of wiggles.

The threefold circular (piscis) network is at the heart of this group of Cyclogon Quilts and is also the pattern of the quilting in this project. Printed out and laid face down on a blank white sheet, the worksheet at left makes it easier to find the various cyclogons (compass net versions of various polygons) used in this group of quilt experiments.

To quote Mr. Deeds and President Kennedy, "These puppies are wicked hard to work with, but it's not because they are easy that we will take these challenges on."

The Last Connoli

This is the last time I'll have to roll this quilt to add another wiggly line of stitches. Turns out I was once again over optimistic about how much more there was yet to do.

Three sets of wiggly lines to outline the triangular pieces, that is rolling and working all the way across adding lines of wiggly stitches three directions. Then three more times to subdivide them into three smaller wobbly triangles. This is where I stopped.

To make the circles and fishy flowers like at the bottom foot or so, would require six more rollings. I'm sure it would be lovely, but it would take me about 20 to 24 more hours. I think I'm really warming up to the wobbly triangles, any one of which would fit in the palm of my hand. These two show views of the top side before it had a border

 I'll get better pictures up tomorrow. As it is I'll be lucky to get this post up by 11:30 tonight.

Cyclocentric Fabric Origami (test 1)

It's not snake-skin, although it approaches that level of pain in the but to work with. OK, it's not sticky or stinky or really easy to poke a hole in, and if you screw it up you don't have to find another snake to continue. But, if you mark the wrong side of the fabric, one can't just flip it over. It's not that kind of symmetrical, especially if you've already cut the edge. Even though it won't work for the project I had in mind, I went ahead and stuffed it down just to see how challenging that was, ow!
The little section in the picture took about an hour. Because of the weird way the edge wobbles, when the network is expanded the lines get fat and thin.

 When they're stuffed in, the thin places want to pull the fabric across from them up. I'm pretty sure I can still hide the edges of  two thicknesses of flannel, but I'm not so sure about fleece or furry velvet. I still want to see the bulgy side after it's been stitched down, but this time that would suck because the good side of the fabric's on the back. Guess I better find another snake, and start over.

Cyclocentric Fabric Origami

This is the first test of a symmetrically collapsed unbroken plane, quilting technique.















 Ideally it would have been on a longer piece of fabric, since if it works I'd like it to be a scarf. It's still a fairly long test strip, yet not so long as to be a severe waste of fabric.

 So far I haven't figured out how to reference up the triangles I haven't seen how the bulge looks. Uh-o, I just realized this a single side good fabric so if the back side's good the bulge isn't. I meant to do that. The plan now calls for a good side bulge, pieced batting and a solid symmetrically dimpled fllannel back.
Stand back, wouldn't want to sew you down to it.