New Design, Whirlpools, in Quiltmaker Magazine May/June 2016

I have a new design in the May/June 2016 issue of Quiltmaker Magazine. The folks at Quiltmaker named the design Whirlpools. I think it’s a perfect name for the design because the rotation of the blocks creates the illusion of swirling water when you see it used in the quilt. I had given it the name Spinning Squash Blossoms, but I like their name better. Once again, Janice Roy of Bridgeport, Connecticut did the beautiful quilting. The lovely fabrics in this design are all from a few different Stonehenge collections by Northcott. After April 15, Quiltmaker will be offering this design in a kit and also the backing fabric sold separately.

The design for this quilt began with a sketch I made in my graph pad. For many of my recent designs I have been exploring 4 way rotational symmetry using blocks that have diagonal symmetry. That means that the block reflects as a mirror of the design along the diagonal division of a square. You can see this in the butterfly block below on the left.
When you place an object around a center point and rotate that object a set amount with each placement you have rotational symmetry. You can see this in the sample on the right below. Floor tiles use 4 way rotational symmetry and they are the inspiration for my design journey.

Below, on the left, you can see my original sketch for this design. As you can see from the final design on the right, this creation went through many iterations before I settled on the final manifestation of the design.

I’ll do my best to walk you through the development of this design. First I created a mockup of the original design in my Electric Quilt (EQ) design software. Even though the original block was designed with a strong diagonal element to the design, the block had no symmetry. To create symmetry I had to flip the block design to mirror itself. The horizontal and vertical red lines are the lines of symmetry.

After getting a look at the whole design using this block I knew I needed to tweak the block to make it simpler. I tried to isolate the elements that I liked in the original design that I liked. Below is a sample of the path this block design took. The first block is the original block design. I have colored the elements that I kept in grey tones so that you can see them within the original block.  For the next iteration of the block, I drew a diagonal line through the center unit of the 5 patch block. I did this to continue the diagonal line that already was developing through the block design. I shaded the resulting triangle in the lighter grey tone. My next idea was to color the block in reverse tones along the diagonal. Therefore the elements that are white on one side are now black on the other side and vice versa with the black elements.

Here is what the resulting block looked like in a tiled layout with rotational symmetry.

It made for a pretty cool design so I explored it further. I rotated the block and tried a mirrored or flipped symmetry in the layout.

I kind of liked the design a bit and decided to explore it a bit more. So I played with the value placement in the block to see what would develop.

Even though I was fond of the resulting design, I felt that I needed to head in a direction that would result in a simpler block to construct. Below are examples of this direction in the design development. I took the design back to the two tone stage where I use only black and white in the block coloring. I liked how this was starting to look and continued to alter elements in the block design.

I liked what I saw and decided to explore this iteration and add more grey tones to the block design. Eventually I came to the final iteration of the design, the last one on the right below, and I was satisfied.

I hope you were able to follow the path of how my mind works. I hope I didn't confuse you, because I sometimes confuse myself. Thank you for reading my post. I hope you enjoyed it!
 
Janice