4, 16, 32

Fractals and spirals and chaos theory! I actually think there are a lot of Mathematicians who are also quilters, and us quilters who are not are probably using a lot more math than we give ourselves credit for.




I went straight to traditional quilting on this one and found 4-patch, 16-patch and 36-patch designs that looked like larger or smaller versions of each other and kinda melded them together to make one 12 x 12 composition. It's mathematical in it's division and near-fractalness. It looks pretty much how I expected it to, but even if (or maybe especially if) I used "mathematical" colors like tints and shades and transparencies of each other, it would look like something made by cutting edge quilters from the seventies when Michael James and Nancy Crow were making perfectly gradated, precisely pieced strips and optical illusions. It just looks like a traditional quilt to me.


I'm going to have to keep working on this theme -- going further back to basics: ones, tens, hundreds, counting, accounting, pattern, predictability, and keeping track of things. Counting something in those groups of five comes to mind, as does an abacus. A loaded phrase like "You do the math," leads me to statistics -- perhaps a comparison of something considered woman's work with something not...