Friday, October 17, 2014

Penrose Tile Quilt with Mylchreest Stars - Design Phase

I just finished another Penrose tile quilt:


First - Credit where it's due...

If you do a Google Image search on 'Penrose tile quilt' the top three results will be this awesome quilt:


This lovely quilt was made by Serena Mylchreest nearly 20 years ago.  This obviously was an inspiration for my design.

The element of the Mylchreest design that I borrowed is the way the rhombi are divided in half (fat rhombi divided lengthwise, and the thin rhombi split on the narrow diagonal) so it is tiled with triangles instead of rhombi.

Then the critical design element is to select colors of different values for the 'light half' and 'dark half' of the rhombi to create the nifty 3-D effect.

I was pleased with the way my last Penrose tile quilt turned out when I first came up with the notion to machine piece the patches before I English paper pieced the rhombi.  So I played around with some other machine piecable patterns and this was one of the results.

When I designed the layout, I wanted to make a Penrose tiling that was not radially symmetrical through the center like my last quilt (and most Penrose tile quilts). I find their quasi-periodic nature one of the more mind bending elements of Penrose tilings, and I feel this is not obvious when it is radially symmetrical.

I began with this simple layout:

The yellow dots indicate the eventual location of the yellow stars.  The black square roughly indicates the final border of the quilt.

Then I deflate the rhombi 3 levels thusly:


I explain inflation/deflation of Penrose tiles more thoroughly in this post.

After removing the superfluous rhombi, we're left with this base layout:


Then we add these machine piece rhombi:





One last design decision I made was to inflate just five of the rhombi to make the one large star.





Two other designs I came up with while playing with machine-pieced rhombi:




2 comments:

Boulder BobWhite said...

Henry is such a lucky cat!

Donna said...

I can't believe you don't have a million comments by now. I'm just about to start my first Penrose quilt, and you have given me much inspiration. Thank-you!