Twelve by Twelve Down Under

Issue 126 (November 2008) of Down Under Quilts magazine features a profile of our very own Kirsten Duncan. But wait, there's more! Under the heading of "Global Quilting", there is also a three page article about the Twelve by Twelve Collaborative Art Quilt Project with insights (and photos) from Australian members Kirsten and Brenda. Grab a copy from your newsagent, or order online, today!

Math -- it's like being in school

My Maths quilt is looking less like pattern drafting and more like a research paper.



I spent a good part of today reading and searching for numbers to illustrate the concept of my quilt. I was pleased to see that at least I had appropriate fabrics in my stash (this is why I won't get rid of ANY fabric -- I've had these for 15 years!).

The Story of Maths

In England, the BBC has been screening a four-part series about the history of mathematics, presented by Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy. Helen, have you been watching The Story of Maths?

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...

Chaos Theory

I started this quilt for a "My World in Black and White" challenge, but of course my crazy, chaotic life took over and I didn't get past some quilting and painting. My thoughts on it go along with Helen's previous fractal post. The larger spiral is made up of smaller spirals, which in theory would then be made up of even smaller spirals. The pattern would continue infinitely. I can't quilt quite that small, so you will have to imagine it being made of smaller and smaller spirals.

I remember from my younger days fractals and chaos theory being connected, but it has been years since I have exposed myself to theoretical mathematics. I have to admit that I was quite the mathematician in my younger days. I finished college calculus junior year in high school, attended the national math convention in Huntsville, Alabama, and was accepted at MIT. It was in Alabama that we attended a lecture about chaos and fractals. Unfortunately, we had a red-eye flight from Seattle the night before and our entire group, including our math teacher, fell asleep during the lecture. Maybe that has something to do with why I don't remember too my details beyond pictures of cauliflower. After high school I turned my back on math and became an art school drop out. Now I have a chance to recover that lost side of my intellect and merge the two.

Fractals

I learned something tonight - see this picture above.. a simple geometric quilt pattern? Nope. A fractal. Which is some high falulutin' mathematical concept.

Specifically this is Sierpinski's carpet fractal.

The mathematicians say,

"The construction of the Sierpinski carpet begins with a square. The square is cut into 9 congruent subsquares in a 3-by-3 grid, and the central subsquare is removed. The same procedure is then applied recursively to the remaining 8 subsquares, ad infinitum. The Hausdorff dimension of the carpet is log 8/log 3 ≈ 1.8928" (from Wikipedia)

Me? I say it is a series of nine patches.....

Maybe I can do this maths related thing after all. In fact fractals are shapes which can be divided into smaller units which all have similarities in shape.

See some more complicated (and fabricy) versions here and here

Notecard winner

The winner of our notecard competition has been chosen by our scientifically randomised number generator. ('Den! Pick a number between one and twenty five....')

It is Lindi but we are grateful for all your comments. Ironically she lives in Australia and I only have the cards to deliver becuase Brenda brought them to the UK from Australia for me to deal with while she was busy in the US....

Poll Results

The results are in!

Last Chance to Vote!

The poll in our blog side bar closes in just a few hours. At present, Dandelion is way out in front as the favourite collaborative quilt mosaic so far but maybe there will a last minute surge for one of the other themes. (Statistics can be fun, and may provide some inspiration for our next theme of "Mathematics".)

At the same time as the poll closes, we will be closing the celebration draw for some special Twelve by Twelve notecards. It's not to late for you to leave a comment so that your name can go into the draw.

Blast from the Past

Hey Kirsty, remember these? Growing up in New Zealand in the 1970s, cuisenaire rods were integral to my early mathematics education.
I'm guessing that cuisenaire rods are not around in schools any more and certainly not the smooth wooden ones like I used to have.

Mathematics

In the current era, my first thought on finding out the theme was this quote from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: Mr Micawber speaking....

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Topping Off or Topping Out

In building construction, topping out, or topping off, is a ceremony held when the last beam is placed at the top of a building. The term may also refer to the overall completion of the building's structure. A topping out ceremony is usually held to commemorate the event. Here on the Twelve by Twelve blog we are celebrating by inviting our readers to leave a comment before 5pm on 15 October to go into a draw for some of our special notecards. You might also like to vote in our poll to nominate your favourite collaborative art quilt mosaic so far (see the sidebar).

Now all of our shelter-themed quilts have been unveiled, I have compiled the collaborative art quilt mosaic:

I always get a thrill to see how our quilts come together in the mosaics. In the Community mosaic, you will recall how Kristin and Gerrie's quilt both featured a similar cross motif. Then in the Illumination mosaic, Gerrie's pears were echoed by Terri's lightbulb. This time, the shape of Diane's cave doorway and Karen's Lost City could almost be the positive/negative of one another (how spooky is that!) while Gerrie and Nikki are channelling orange. What do you see?

PS: Don't miss out on seeing what others have to say. Here is the link for the comments feed on this blog.

and the Next Theme is ...

Mathematics:
The study of the measurement, properties, and relationships of quantities and sets, using numbers and symbols.

Over the last year I have spent a lot of time thinking about this theme. Ideas have come and gone, but this is the one that has continually stuck. I almost abandoned it thinking it lacked definite visuals or it was too broad. But this is suppose to be a challenge! I have no idea what I am going to do, so I have no advantage over everyone else. So now it's time to explore the other side of our brains.

Everlasting

I was excited by this challenge... because I have a penchant for house blocks!! But, after a little consideration, I reminded myself that I have a personal challenge amongst all of this to make something that is not my first inclination (most of the time I succeed!).

As I considered "Shelter" the idea that returned over and over was of the safe and loved childhood I enjoyed. My childhood was spent on a large block of land where both my parents and my maternal grandparents had houses and I was adored and spoiled by all of them. There was a huge vege garden and an orchard and Dad built us an enormous sandpit. The more I thought about it all, the more I realised that an attempt at a realistic image would never express all of it, so my quilt became more and more abstract.

Until, it was this. More or less a schematic (I hope I am using this word correctly!) of the land and houses. It isn't to scale but it does contain both houses, the sandpit, important trees (including this one) and even my Grandfather's truck which was always parked in the same place.

The name for my quilt is "Everlasting". The benefit of a loving childhood has an everlasting benefit on ones life. It is also a reference to the first lines of a hymn which ran through my head as I considered the impact of my blessed start in life:
Everlasting arms of Love
are around, beneath, above...

Shelter From the Storm

This challenge was the hardest for me to get going on and maintain momentum. I'm not sure if it's because I had too many ideas, or not enough good ideas, no focus, or as Karen suggested, my head just was in another place due to our move.



I toyed with a wide range of ideas and kept circling around the shelter of a mother's care and a sheltered life (not unexpected ideas from a geographically single mother trying to balance how much to expose her kids to or not). The concepts in my head didn't match what my hands were willing to do though. Finally, about a week ago, I was looking out the window at some very dramatic clouds moving over the mountains towards us, and decided to just keep it simple.



Log cabin construction reinforces the house/shelter and a contrast of warm colors for the house with cool, stormy colors for the outside hopefully tells the story. I had a lot of fun finding meaningful "stormy" fabrics like the swirling leaves, puddled water, driving rain, and of course, storm clouds. If the Japanese ones at the top look familiar it's because they were a gift from Jude of Spirit Cloth, who has also used them to great effect in her own dramatic work.