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CONTENTS: Announcements - Ask EQ - Free Stuff - Works For Me - Show & Tell - Quilt University - Hidden Block Quilts - Tessellating Fish - Designs by Alene - Karin Hellaby - Mischele Hart & Ann Castleberry - Color Printing Tips - Electric Quilt Computer Lab

Tessellating Fish
By Janice Dowdeswell - Wanganui, New Zealand

Tessellating Fish

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Janice is a new EQ5 user who shares the her original design with you in this EQ5 project file. To download the project, click here.

I have been quilting for about 18 months now, since my husband took me to the National Symposium held here at Easter 2001. We were both just overwhelmed by the quilts on display, and wanted to buy ourselves one. They were expensive though, and I said "I would love to try making one," and he said "why don't you?" so we decided to spend the money on quilting equipment and here I am!

I had always sewn my children's clothes, but stopped sewing about ten years ago and started computing for pleasure as well as at work. So it was easy for me to teach myself quilting from the many good sites found on the internet. One of the things I discovered was tessellations. They fascinated me (my math background I guess) and I read a couple of tutorials on how to do your own. They recommended, "start with a basic shape and whatever you take from one side, add to the opposite and vice versa."

A few weeks later, I was looking at a very simple fish block and started thinking, "I bet that could be tessellated." I worked on it with graph paper for a few hours one evening but didn't get a satisfactory result.

I woke at 5:30 the next morning with the answer, and had to get up right away to fetch my graph paper and start again. The answer was to have the block on point!

The beauty of the finished unit is that it is so easy to piece. The whole block is made from just two basic blocks: one kite, which can be foundation pieced if you want, and one nine-patch made of six squares and six half-square triangles.

Now that I had my block worked out, I wanted to try different colors to see the effect. I drew the block on graph paper and colored, I drew the block in a drawing program on the computer and colored - both methods were absolutely tedious so...I decided to save up and buy Electric Quilt.

And here are my finished quilts! If you want to see more of my quilts, look here:

Janice recommends these quilting and math Web sites for more information about tessellations: http://www.quiltgallery.com/technique2.htm
http://mathforum.org/sum95/suzanne/tess.intro.html http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/RR/database/RR.09.96/archamb1.html

CONTENTS: Announcements - Ask EQ - Free Stuff - Works For Me - Show & Tell - Quilt University - Hidden Block Quilts - Tessellating Fish - Designs by Alene - Karin Hellaby - Mischele Hart & Ann Castleberry - Color Printing Tips - Electric Quilt Computer Lab