Seven Brides For Seven Brothers

As ideas go, this is a pretty insane one. I’ve been routing my creativity off in a few different directions while stumped on how to proceed with Adam’s wedding quilt (sigh, hang head in shame, lather, rinse, repeat) and this direction has been stranger than most.

I’ve made no secret of my intention of doing a Penrose tiling quilt (‘Pentatonic’) later this year, and it has sent my brain in lots of new directions. It’s caused me to look hard at Islamic tiling patterns, which meant I encountered more aperiodic tilings, and started looking at patterns that weren’t based on the fours, sixes, eights, and nines of standard quilting.

Then I found John Savard’s page (http://quadibloc.com) and specifically his page on heptagonal tilings. Yep, sevens. My brain melted slightly when I tried to process the math; much of it is specialized and I am untrained. But there was an image, down at the bottom, an image that baked my brain and caused a flurry of emails.

[ click to bake your brain ]

I’ve been scribbling ever since. I worked out the angles first:

• The tiny light blue rhombs are 14 per circle, so 360° / 14 == 25.714°. 154.286° for the other angle.
• The bright green rhombs have a point tucked between the two wide points of #1 — those two wide points added together are 308.57°, which means the bright greens have angles of 51.429° and 128.571°.
• The magenta rhombs form 360° when combined with the skinny side of #1 (25.714°) and two fat sides of #2 (128.571 * 2 = 257.142°) so they must be 360° - 282.857° == 77.143° on on side, and 102.857° on the other.

It took several false starts, and a frustrated email to seanb and Stephen, before Jacob supplied me with two small pieces of information I needed to start laying out the design.

[‘Finally!’]

It took a while to get from there, to here:

[‘Kaleidoscope stops here’]

To make it even vaguely workable, the quilt needs to be at least a queen size. I’m assuming at least 100”x110”. I pulled some approximations to the blue fabrics I’ve been thinking of using in a future quilt, and started doing color replacement (“select same fill color” was a welcome function!) until I had a few options. This one felt the best:

[‘First draft’]

I resized the pieces to get something workable, and then started moving them around to get an idea of how they’d look once I cropped off the excess. I did a few versions, and this one felt the most color-balanced to me:

[‘The plan, I think’]

If ‘pentatonic’ doesn’t kill me, this one might. To quote the JeffSpouse: “That’s a fuckload of pieces, you know.”

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