“Illusions of Christmas” – A New Mini Quilt

It’s the last day of the Spring 2018 Art with Fabric blog hop, and my turn to show you my quilt interpretation of the hop theme “1+1=3”.

What does “1+1=3” mean to you and how would you quilt it? My first thoughts were to produce a set of quirky critters that captured the essence of a young family. But May has been seriously crazy and I had neither the time nor energy in the end to whip up such a pattern from scratch.

The other connotation I was strongly drawn to was the mathematical impossibility of the “1+1=3” statement. And this led me down the path of optical illusions and the deliberate act of placing shapes and colours such that the brain sees things that don’t exist. So that is what I have explored.

I ended up with this mini quilt, which I have called Illusions of Christmas.

Let me tell you more about this little quilt, the inspiration source and how it came about. 

Psst…… If the green pieces in this quilt look square and straight to you then the  illusion isn’t evident. If this is the case and you want to see the illusion right now, get out of your seat and stand back from your screen. When you are too close to the quilt your eyes are not fooled into seeing what is not there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
(Hughes Mearns, public domain)

How I made “Illusions of Christmas”

Materials

I started with three green fabrics in shades that provided recognisable colour contrast between them. A light, a medium and a dark. But not too light and not too dark, as I needed them to also contrast with a checkered fabric. Green was an arbitrary colour choice…. I believe any hue will do as long as you have three distinguishable points on the colour contrast continuum.

I intended to get a black and white check, or at least a navy and white, but beggars can’t be choosers. There was only one checkered fabric available locally that had very light and very dark colours, and had squares the right size suitable to create the illusion. I didn’t want to be working with tiny fiddly pieces, so red it was. The squares on this check are about 1 cm square.

Red and white and green. Very Christmasy. And therefore the name, Illusions of Christmas.

Construction

Anyway, I cut 3″ strips from the two lighter green fabrics and sewed them alternately to create green stripes.

Then I cut new 3″ strips perpendicularly from this new strip strata and also from the darkest green fabric.

I sewed these alternately to create the basic quilt top.

I backed the red and white check fabric with fusible adhesive and cut it into squares of 4 checks. These were placed on point onto all the junctions of all the fabrics on the quilt top. I alternated their direction, so that the red squares sat on top of each other, then next to each other and so on.

This quilt is not intended to get a great deal of washing, so I simply secured the fused squares to the quilt as I quilted the entire thing with invisible thread. I quilted in the ditch between the green fabrics and sewed just inside the edge of the fused fabrics. 

I finished it off with a simple single-fold machine binding in the darkest of the three green fabrics.  

How we got here and how the illusion works

I was on the lookout for a simple optical illusion I could quilt for this hop when my hubby sent me a link to a very powerful illusion designed by Victoria Skye. Her illusion is called Skye Blue Café Wall Illusion and was a bit more complicated than I was thinking of. But it got me thinking…..

Firstly, I found out about the Café Wall Illusion. Wikipedia to the rescue!

And I discovered that us Australians have taken this illusion to whole new heights! Yup, we’d do that!

I learned that this illusion actually dates to before the café, back to 1898, is one of a family of optical illusions called “tilt illusions” and that a Japanese Professor named Akiyoshi Kitaoka has a keen interest in creating and studying such illusions. He has even authored a free-to-access journal paper about tilt illusions.

Victoria Skye’s illusion has black and white check diamonds at the junctions of larger squares and strips arranged in a grid. I learned that these diamonds (also known as targets) cause those larger squares to appear tilted by a mechanism called “fringed edges”. So I thought I would sew up a grid of squares and strips, add the checkered four patch targets to the junction points and see what happens. A digital mock-up was promising, so I sewed the quilt as described above.

Can you see the illusion of tilted squares?

Up close, this quilt just looks like a green grid with red and white checks on point. But as you move away, an illusion of tilted squares and zigzag lines emerges. I have shown the Illusions of Christmas mini quilt here in three sizes in the hope that at least one will be the right size on your screen for you to see the illusion clearly.

Here they are again in grayscale, to remove the effect of colour.

The pieces of this quilt truly are square and straight. In fact, this is probably one of the squarest mini quilts I have made in a loooong time. Isn’t that funny! 🙂

I was going to hang this mini on the wall, but it needs quite a distance from quilt to viewer to reveal its magical optical properties. The camera actually sees it more easily because it makes it small. So maybe I will put it out at Christmas as a table topper instead. I’m sure the kids will love picking it up and providing some “manual zoom” so that unsuspecting guests suddenly find themselves “appreciating” the seemingly innocuous quilt-let from across the room. Because kids are usually subtle…..

Anyway, enough from me.

Go and find the rest of today’s Art with Fabric bloggers and admire their fabulous creations too.

And yesterday’s Art with Fabric bloggers as well:

Julie at Julie Bagamary Art
Karen at Tu-Na Quilts, Travels, and Eats 
Wendy at Pieceful Thoughts of My Quilting Life

You can find the contributors to the first two days of this blog hop on these posts: Monday and Tuesday, or visit Alida at Tweety Loves Quilting.

P.S. If you were liking the Wish Upon A Star Blog Hop, you can find the rest of the week’s posts here too:

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!