On Quilting and Flying Geese
10:00 AM |
| Say hello to my first ever quilting project! |
Warning: this blog post is very image heavy.
This past semester, I finally got the chance to take a class I've been wanting to take since Junior fall - Visual Computing, with Terry Knight. It's a computation class that focuses on shape grammars, and one of my best friends took it Junior fall and introduced me to the concept. I was intrigued, but I had conflicts up until now.
Shape grammars is essentially this idea where you have these rules, called grammars, and you apply the rules to simple shapes to create new shapes and designs. It's a concept that works in multiple realms - architects have used it in building plan designs, but you could use it in furniture design, textile design... basically any form of design that, you know, uses shapes.
When we were presented with our final assignment for the class, which was an open-ended project that dealt with shape grammars, my mind immediately went to quilts. Since I sew, it seemed like an obvious topic - quilts deal with simple shapes and those shapes are aggregated into a larger design. (It helped that one of my peers was doing a project on crochet, so the whole textile thing was already in my head.)
Even though I had picked a topic, I still needed to narrow it down. Quilts, unsurprisingly, is a very wide topic with endless possibilities, and I needed to choose a design and a narrative that I could focus on. At first, I looked at Asian cultural quilts, simply because I am Chinese, but I didn't feel inspired by any of the ones I saw. I started thinking broader again, and discovered a fairytale of quilts used during the Civil War era to help slaves escape from slavery through the Underground Railroad. Apparently, the quilt designs were used as mnemonic devices to aid slaves in memorizing directives before leaving the plantations.
This concept was tremendously exciting to me. It indicated that a visual language had been developed by slaves to communicate with each other in circumstances that quite literally could not be worse, and it speaks volumes of their incredible ingenuity and survivability.
I was so mind blown.
The issue is, of course, that there isn't a lot of research around this topic. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), most Black history has been passed down by word of mouth due to circumstances. After all, it's difficult to write down your history when you were barred from communicating and learning. Quilts degrade and get thrown out after use - from what I read, there are little to no samples of actual Civil War-era quilts. This whole concept could just be an urban legend.
Luckily, I wasn't writing a history paper. I was just pulling concepts from an existent design to create grammars and new designs.
There are a few quilt designs that are said to have been in this specific use, so I picked one that I could pick grammars out of and could develop into interesting new designs.
The quilt design I picked was the Flying Geese quilt block. According to the resources I was looking at, the Flying Geese represented the fleeing slaves, and was supposedly a representation of the best season (summer) and the direction (north) for which to escape.
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| This is the traditional design for a Flying Geese quilt block. |
I looked at a few different precedents before actually starting to dissect the designs for grammars. I wanted to have a variety of designs to pull from, so I looked at some more traditional designs as well as some more modern designs.
I found that there were two different approaches to quilt design. The first (upper row) was through designing quilt blocks, which were then repeated over and over again until there was a finished quilt. The second (bottom row) was through the design of a full quilt, in which the blocks are not apparent. I wanted to pursue both approaches in my iterations.
From my four precedent designs, I extracted four grammars that described the goose-to-goose relationships. I also had some fun naming them. (I also had two relationships for the blocks, a translation and a mirror.)
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| glide |
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| flap |
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| gaggle |
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| gosling |
This is where the project got fun. I used my grammars to begin iterating new designs. During this time, I disregarded the original narrative of the design - I wanted to spend more of my time designing as opposed to researching what potential narratives could present themselves. I didn't show computations for each design - that would've taken much too long - but they're fairly straightforward. Also, I used the same colorings for the geese throughout the project so I could more easily compare them.
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| This was one of my favorites, which I called "woven". After creating the block, I used my "translate" grammar to aggregate the blocks. Also, I really enjoyed the emergent design that was similar to the "crossroads" pattern, another Underground Railroad quilt design. |
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| The corresponding computation for my "woven" design. |
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| The "woven" design, but with a mirrored block instead of a translated one. I called it "crops". |
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| I called this one "swamp". This was a play off of the traditional flying geese block, but with "gosling" inserted. The top row shows translated blocks; the bottom row shows mirrored ones. |
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| "Stars", because I really liked the emergent stars in the center of each block. I also liked that when I changed the coloring, the stars disappear. |
After playing with different block variations, I started looking at designs where the geese populate the entire quilt instead of forming blocks.
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| "Spiral". I started in the center of the quilt and spiraled outwards. |
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| This is part of the computation for "spiral" - you can see how I essentially started with a traditional quilt block but removed the block constraint. |
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| I added gosling to the "spiral" design. |
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| And I added gosling to the emergent geese. I really enjoyed the strange emergent shapes that I called mutants, which you can see more clearly in the center design! |
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| "Patch" |
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| "Patch" with gosling! |
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| "Patch" with more gosling. |
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| I wanted to see what would happen if I only applied the gosling rule to the emergent geese, and the result was very interesting! They remind me of mountains. |
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| I made a pillow with my "woven" design. It's very comfy and I like it. |
All in all, I thought this was a pretty successful first foray into the world of quilting. I'm very excited to explore more, and I felt like this project is just one example of how flexible and applicable shape grammars can be!
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