Busy weekend and maths geek moment

I've accomplished a lot this weekend. I've been working on my course homework and quilting too, sometimes at the same time!

My homework is to develop an MEA (model-eliciting activity). An MEA is a problem (in this case a maths problem) set in a real context where students can bring their knowledge to develop their own approach to solving the problem.

So the prior knowledge students would need to have to be able to solve this problem is some basic knowledge of geometry and trig ratios. There would be some other questions before this to check their knowledge. This is my first draft of the problem question.

Citrus

 I think I started this quilt, Citrus, in 2000 and finished almost 2 years ago. I have no idea how I drew the original pattern.  That knowledge is lost in the mists of time!  All I know is that the crescent shape is made by dividing a circle into 10 divisions and drawing another circle the same size so that it crosses with three divisions in the concave bit. 



I would like to make a similar quilt with a smaller shape.


Draw a crescent shape made from a circle with radius of 50mm.


Write a report explaining how to draw the crescent shape accurately. Also explain how you arrived at your solution and how to draw a crescent of any size.

Now I have to confess, I can't leave a good maths problem alone so I've already figured this one out. I also have a bonus question based on sashiko embroidery and crescent shapes but I'll save that for later. Here is my design using a crescent with 50mm radius. There are also crescents with 9 divisions (my next problem).

By Sunday I was on a roll. I sorted out my stash, put all the fabric away from the last three projects and picked out fabric for this tree. I started cutting out while watching 'Bicentennial Man'. I love that movie! I remember reading the short stories back in the early '70s. It was 3pm when the movie finished and I hadn't had lunch! I thought I was a bit hungry! Here's my fabric. The leaves/flowers and small bits of the flowerpot are in a baggie because I've decided, if a fit of madness, to piece the background with all these little squares. It may be a while before I get on to the rest of this quilt.

That isn't all I've been up to this weekend.  This was a bit of experimenting I did on Saturday night. I've been admiring all these wonderful quilts on the Blogger Quilt Festival (see last post) and wanted to try out some drawing on fabric.  I have Crayola fabric crayons, pigma pen, Fabrico pens, dimensional paint and acrylic paint. Here's what I found out.

• Acrylic paint still makes the fabric stiff, even if you add textile medium. I tried it on a bit of quilting too (the orange fabric just out of the picture). Painting inside my quilting line was difficult.  Painting and then quilting didn't work very well. The thread snapped if I accidentally tried to stitch over the paint.
• Dimensional paint, well that ship has sailed, hasn't it. 
• I've used Fabrico pens and pigma pens before in my Japanese Lady. I remember the colour from the Fabrico goes a bit further after you paint but I don't remember it running into the pigma pen and pulling the black ink out further, like in my first tree trunk. The second tree was done by drawing the trunk first with the Fabrico pen, letting that dry and then outlining it with the pigma pen.  The other advantage of that method is that it's easier to draw too.
• The crayons only come in eight colours. I wanted to see how well they blended.  My yellow, orange, burnt sienna matrix is quite interesting. I could see them being useful and a lot cheaper than oil sticks!

I like the Fabrico pens best and I really like doing zentangle type designs with the pigma pen. I think the most successful part of the experiment is the orange Jacobean-style petal on the flower.

That was my weekend. How was your weekend?

Citrus Quilt

I'm so pleased to finally have a full photo of this quilt.

The design came from a jigsaw. I love jigsaws and tessellations fascinate me so when I found a jigsaw where all the pieces were the same shape, I had to buy it. I've changed the multi-faceted jigsaw pieces into a smooth crescent shape. This means that I had to overlap the shapes so my quilt isn't strictly a tessellation. I like that too. The layout is still the same as the jigsaw. I think there are other layouts that would work too and one day I'm going to do some experimenting with that.

This quilt started life as a single bed quilt for my daughter, Melanie. I think that was about 2000/2001. It was originally going to be just the crescent shapes in the middle. It's hand-pieced, which obviously took quite a while.  In that time she got engaged (now married) so I added the blue border to make it a double/queen bed size. That was a bit tricky. I made the border as accurately and carefully as I could but as you can imagine, I had a big floppy rectangular doughnut. Then the middle piece had all these floppy edges with it not being square either! I had to put one on top of the other and try to end up with a flat quilt. I pinned all around the edge of crescents and hand-appliqued them to the blue border.  That took me three months.

Finished at last - or was I?  I looked at this quilt for ages, put it away, took it back out - several times.  I knew that it needed more. An operation on my foot and six weeks in plaster gave me the opportunity to applique the extra crescents on the blue border.  I thought about making the extra ones gradually smaller but opted for the idea that the crescents are falling off.

So in 2009 I had finally finished the piecing. I could have waited another nine to ten years to quilt it - or go with the easy option and have it quilted.  I went for the easier option and asked Jo Hollings to quilt it for me. We chose an overall design with nice curving shapes, based on a kowhaiwhai design.  I can't remember what it's called.  Another reason why I want to keep this blog.

And that is the story of my Citrus Quilt, named obviously for all the citrus colours.  Look out for more of this design.  I'll try to figure out a quicker way to do it.