Quilt Design Archives

Over the last 9 months I have been working on my color wheel quilt. A few weeks ago I posted about using the Pathagorean Theorum to calculate the size of the triangles needed to fill the corners.

Now the question was exactly what to add to the corners. In my original design, the outside circles were going to move in curvy lines…..

But, when I started laying out circles in different orientations, having curves in the outside drew the eye away from the center rather than toward it……

I had also considered making the darkest grey into a circle, but quickly decided that it wasn’t worth the effort!!!

After a lot more playing around……

…….I decided that a starburst effect would draw the eye to the middle……

At this point I realized that I needed a bit more fabric than I had on hand so, while I waited for UPS to make a drop to my door, I started making all of the circles. I found that the colors were much easier to pick since I had my fabrics folded so well. This was the basic way that I worked…..

SUCH luscious colors!!!!

You can check out this post where I tell how I prepared the circles.

Once the fabric arrived I made strip sets and then trimmed them down to a size that was a few inches larger than the final product…..

Now I needed to transfer the circle pattern onto each of the 4 fabric triangles. I started by tracing the triangle onto the fabric and adding the straight radiating lines. Next step was to trace the circles onto the fabric……

Final step was to baste each of the circles into place….

Then it was time to put it up on the design wall…..

Happily, I am pleased with how this looks!!!

So, now every night will find me sitting in my chair and appliquéing circles!!!

LET THE FUN TIMES BEGIN!!!

According to Wikipedia, Pathagoras of Samos was an ancient Greek Philosopher who lived from 570BC to 495 BC. Under Occupation, it lists Philosopher, Teacher and Mathematician……quite the trifecta!!! But this third occupation is the one that puts him squarely in the middle of a blog devoted to quilting!!!

Cast your mind back to my Color Wheel quilt that was started about this time last year. I dutifully appliqued all of the circles on and then things came to a grinding halt with studio renovation, tax season and, dare I say it, CORONA!!!!

This was the last post that I made about this quilt and it ended up with the idea of continuing the quilt by putting it on point and adding triangles to each corner. This was my final idea about how to proceed……

So today was the day to figure out what size the triangles would need to be and THAT is where Pathagoras comes in. As part of his discoveries, he found the Pathagorean Theorem, based on this diagram……

….which I don’t REALLY understand, but I did understand the formula where a and b equal to the sides of the triangle and c is the hypotenuse of the triangle……

Since I always loved Algebra, I was pretty sure that I could figure this out!!! Normally, I would have just used trial and error and then cut off any extra along the sides but this time I needed to have things a bit more precise.

The first thing that I did was to lay out the top as it stands right now and figure out exactly where the next border would be added on. I used my Laser Square Up to draw in some basic lines…..

And then measured to see how long each side would be. I found that the hypotenuse of the triangle was 59.5 so now I had to calculate the sides. I started with the formula and did the math…..

…finding that my square needed to be 42 inches. I then drew a 42 inch square on paper, divided it across the diagonal and, voila….it measured 59.5 inches…..

It WORKED!!!!

Since I am wanting to have circle made from the 4 triangle corners, I now needed to get the circle drafted. Since my triangle was only 1/2 of the square in the corner, I needed to complete the square to draft the circle. Of course, I had ALREADY cut the square apart and discarded the unused portion so I moved to the floor and “drew” out the other half of the square with painter’s tape……