tiling

This is another quickie baby quilt — quickie because this little girl was just born, and babies don't stay babies for long!

This quilt is an odd combination: the gentle florals of Liberty fabric with the unusual patternings of mathematical tilings. Okay, it's odd to anyone else but ME. Here's the pattern I'm using to make this quilt:

& Roses">& Roses" title="Tiling pattern for Tea & Roses" class=" flickr-photo-img" height="365" width="500" />
['Tiling pattern for Tea & Roses']

I got word early this week that one of my stepbrothers' wives had had her baby, and shock of shocks, a girl at last! When my mother remarried a few years ago, she came into the marriage with one grandson; Paul came into the marriage with FIVE grandsons. Needless to say, the prospect of a granddaughter has everyone excited.

The story of "Chaos Theory" is the story of an unlikely set of friendships, the kind of friendships that happen far more commonly in a far-flung internet age. It's also a story of introverts stepping out of their shells, of red-wine and third-story hotel rooms; of sign language and little girls with big brown eyes and bright smiles.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It starts at my desk, at work, about a year and a half ago, as I prepared to head to my first DrupalCon. After years of being swaddled in the familiarity of Dragon*Con, I was more than a little daunted by the prospect of going to a convention where there would be a thousand or so of THEM and only one of ME. Cue Introvert Panic™.

What's the saying — the life you save may be your own?

A Penrose tiling is an aperiodic tiling consisting of only two tiles and containing five-fold symmetry. The wikipedia entry for Penrose tilings has good images and information about it, plus a couple of photos that help you see how the pattern might look when colored in.

I am aware of the existence of a few small Penrose quilts, but from examining the photos it looks like they contain at most three iterations of the tiling. Not surprising — it's hard to find images to work from that have more than three iterations. I had to install Inkscape and use the instructions on this page to render out seven iterations of the pattern, but it's in readiness for when I decide to tackle the pattern.

Like I needed a new obsession.

On Friday afternoon, Jacob introduced me to Penrose tilings, which were entirely new to me. I was completely fascinated, running off in a multitude of directions to learn about things like 'aperiodic tilings' and tile patterns in Islamic architecture, and by Saturday I was hooked.