Creating a Quilt Block with Tessellation Exploration |
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| The following steps will allow you to reproduce many traditional quilt blocks as a Tessellation Exploration tile. Once you master the process, you can design your own patterns and then recreate them with the software. You don't have to be artistically gifted to be creative with quilt blocks - just careful! | |||
| To begin, download the compressed file sqgrids.zip. Unzip this collection of Tessellation Exploration square grid files to a convenient location on your hard drive. | |||
| Step 1: | Select a traditional quilt-block pattern that is based
on a square grid. Suitable examples will be found in Quilt
Blocks Galore and Quilt Block Collection
(requires
Adobe Acrobat Reader).
For the best printed resource, consult Mary Ellen Hopkin's The
It's Okay If You Sit on My Quilt Book with over 350 color examples
of geometric quilt blocks on a gridded background. As an example, we will
select the 4x4 quilt block called Cube Lattice. You will require
two copies of the block to complete the exercise.
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| Step 2: | Cube Lattice is based on a 4x4 square grid. Using a marker,
superimpose a drawing of the 4x4 grid over one copy of the block. Notice
the diagonal lines of the block. They extend from corner to opposite corner
of the corresponding squares on the grid.
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| Step 3: | Launch Tessellation Exploration, then open the appropriate file
in the directory of square grids. For Cube Lattice, open the file
<4x4.tsl>. Zoom in to enlarge the view.
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| Step 4: | Using the Line tool in the double-black color and the thinnest
line width, add all appropriate diagonal lines to the grid on the computer
screen. Both cross hairs of the cursor should line up with the horizontal
and vertical grid lines when you depress the mouse button to begin a diagonal
line and again when you release it. Each diagonal line should have exactly
one pixel per row and column.
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| Step 5: | Study the original quilt block (the copy without the superimposed square
grid). With the Pencil tool and the thinnest line width, color double-white
all pixels in horizontal and vertical lines that are not part of the block
pattern. Zoom in and out as needed. You may use the Eraser tool
where convenient, but the Pencil tool works best for fixing pixels
adjacent to lines that are part of the block pattern.
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| Step 6: | Color the patches of the block with the Paint Bucket tool. For
this example, we will use the two colors of a standard color pair for the
parallelograms, and double-black for the squares.
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| Step 7: | Notice that the default setting for the corresponding tessellation
is same coloring, but you may elect to use contrasting coloring for a different
effect.
SAME COLORING
CONTRASTING COLORING
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