English Paper Piecing - like the grandmother's garden hexagons

Thanks!! (Duh :oops: :oops: :lol: :lol: )

I did too. It changed every second as to how it looked too. I think it might drive me insane (half way there now) to put that together.

wow, I would be interested in that pattern also, so you pick out your fabrics and send to them to cut out????

so what is the name of that pattern???

Hi - thought I'd chime in, since some people seem to have found my post (on domesticat.net) and have expressed interest.

I can confirm that yes, the pattern shown in the original photo is a Penrose tiling, and the angles someone wrote in a previous post look correct.

If you're thinking of tackling the pattern, I'd definitely encourage it, but there's definitely some caveat emptor here. There's a lot of math behind why the two Penrose patterns (yes, there are two, commonly called 'sun' and 'star') are the way they are, and one of the most important points about the design is that a true Penrose tiling doesn't repeat. Not fully, not ever; Roger Penrose's discovery of this pattern was the highlight of his professional career as a mathematician. (He's still alive, and a professor at Oxford.)

The quilt person in me says "the two pieces can fit together in quite a few different ways that are pretty" but the math geek in me says "but please don't call your quilt a Penrose tiling if it really isn't."

An example of a not-quite-Penrose is the baby quilt Penmanship, which I just finished up tonight. It uses the same two pieces, but it is NOT a Penrose tiling. It's a variant called a 'cartwheel.' The blog post is at http://domesticat.net/quilts/penmanship and the flickr photoset is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157624162169050 -- but this should give you an idea:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/...4588260404.jpg
original photo on flickr

The blog post I made at http://domesticat.net/2010/03/penrose-quilting contains a few files that should help you out, and gives you a big enough rendering of a Penrose tiling that should allow you to get up to a king-sized quilt out of it.

If you're struggling to see the patterns in the Penrose, here's a screenshot of the planning process for the quilt Pentatonic (http://domesticat.net/quilts/pentatonic) I'll be starting in a few weeks. I'll post photos of my progress at http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157623606678245/

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4012/...d8d1441bd9.jpg
original photo on flickr

If you let your line of sight flow out from the center of the square, look outward just a little and you'll see what looks almost like a five-lobed flower. Look further out and you'll see a partial repeat of the center. A bit further still and you'll see each of those five pieces are actually partial repeats of the initial five-lobed flower. If you extended it further still, the pattern would continue to expand and fracture in a complex but comprehensible way. That is a Penrose tiling.

If you've got questions, feel free to contact me. There's a contact form over at domesticat.net, and I'm reachable at [email protected]. If you decide to dive into the world of tilings-based quilts, I'd love to talk to you.

...and now I'm off to pull 'Penmanship' out of the dryer...

Wow! simply complicatedly gorgeous! Another one for 'the list'...

This is AMAZING...

Wow, I wouldn't know where to start.

Cool - thank you for joining in.