Penrose Posey is DONE

Penrose Posey

started Feb 2005. Finished Sept 2009.

Its an interesting story behind how the Penrose came to be worked on. There was a discussion about using mathematical concepts as designs for quilts on one of the forums I belong to...one of the ladies posted a link to some mathematical quilts that she had found...I went and looked at the link and saw some really neat quilts. A group of us were working on the Giant Dahlia pattern at the time and I thought the Penrose Tile looked kind of like a different version of the dahlia.

I mentioned it to one of the ladies who promptly designed the two tiles in EQ5 (Penrose Tiles are made of just 2 shapes - a narrow dart and a fat kite) as an exercise to see if she could do it.

I meanwhile was doodling on a layout..and figured out what colors I wanted where - the medallion reminded me of a flower...

Of all the parts about quilting, I like cutting pieces the least (actually I detest it) so the lady that designed the tiles templates said she would do the cutting for me for a very reasonable fee! I sent the fabrics to her, she marked and cut out the tiles and shipped them back to me...all nice and neat little piles of kites and darts...

I sewed the penrose medallion together - I think it took just a weekend to do the hand stitching of the tiles, designed the vines, and appliqued the center to my background - this was the first time I had cut out the background on an applique - decided it would just be too much to quilt thru if that extra layer of fabric was still there... it was pretty nerve-wracking before I did it..but it turned out fine...

Eventually, I was finally able to track down the designer of the mathematical quilts on the above link! Her name is Pat Storey and she lives in England. Her mathematical quilts were published in a magazine...amazingly, I just happened to see the magazine (the store only had ONE copy!) and had to buy it!

There is a lot of info on the web about Sir Roger Penrose - an English mathematician...and his tiling designs.

It took 4.5 years to finish this quilt..the first time I started hand quilting it, I was using cotton batting..and it was a bear to get the gold metallic thread I decided to quilt with thru the cotton batting..ripped it all out and restarted with wool batting..much easier, but still a tricky business hand quilting with metallic thread..

Here is a closer picture..the gold thread is a little hard to make out..but it does sparkle in person.

The vines were made with a Clover bias maker..I used Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It to keep them in place..the tile buds and leaves had the seam allowances glued under as well (that was before I had learned to do needleturn!).

It feels good to get one of my really long outstanding UFO's done!

(but I still haven't made my Giant Dahlia yet!)