Optical Illusion 1

Not much optical illusion here yet:

Optical Illusion.
On the left the middle three strips (the narrowest).

but I thought I'd share the process with you. I'll be posting again on this project over the next few weeks (and knowing me - months!)

I started sewing it yesterday, but I've been working on it since the beginning of November. This is a course at Quilters Palet in The Hague to make an optical illusion quilt, but without a standard pattern. Each participant was given about six grids that can serve as the base for the design and the first session (and a few more evenings) was spent in drawing more lines and colouring until a satisfactory result appeared. I tried using several grids before I arrived at this one.

Then choosing the fabric. I've since seen a black and white quilt on Pinterest (unfortunately the name of the maker is not given in the original post) using this grid as the basic design and that would have been easier, but I chose four shades of yellow and five of green and the dark purple as the contrast colour. It doesn't look like it but there really are four different yellow solids in the photo above, along with the lightest green and a lot of purple.

My original coloured design on A4 size paper

At the same time the A4 sheet with my original design had to be blown up to mammoth proportions,

Amazing, isn't it - you go to a professional printer and he manages to print it crooked!
(original at the bottom)

the strips traced onto dressmakers' pattern paper (all 23 of them), and then pieced paper piecing style.

paper piecing: the figures on the papers help me keep track of which fabric to use

the sewing set up: the fabric swatch chart in the foreground helps me identify the fabrics I'm using,
I'm working on two strips simultaneously so I can chain piece;  more than two  would be too confusing.

I started with the narrowest strips because I needed to check that the smallest blocks are more than ¼" square because of  the seam allowances. I'm going to sew these together next and see how they go, otherwise I 'll scrap them and just leave out these rows.

The next, and final, lesson is on 9 January so I hope to have something more than four rows to show. I have no idea how I'm going to quilt this, or whether I want borders or not. Still lots to think about and decisions to make.

I'm linking up to :

   

So head over there to see what else has been going on this week.

Happy sewing

Marly.