My aperiodic mono-tile quilt adventure!

It's been forever since I wrote and also, I can't seem to get this site to direct to my regular kidsmathteacher.com. This is how far I have gotten with my aperiodic monotile quilt!

4 columns of the 19 column 57" square aperiodic monotile quilt are done! : )

Here's the story of this quilt and how I've been working on it.
Luke (my engineer husband) sent me a link to a new type of mathematical pattern https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/ on March 28th and said it should be my next quilt. I do really like making my own patterns and this would be a good challenge.
I looked at the design for a bit and thought of a way to create it using columns. This is what I first drew on my phone.

I needed to figure out the size I wanted each piece to be. I printed out a few pieces of triangular paper. 
With the small one I made the basic shape and then with one having the triangular dots spaced 2” apart I was able to make a mock up of the size I wanted.

Each side of the kite/diamond piece was 1.75” along the long part of the kite and 1” along the short sides.

My measured out finished size and the five shapes that are used in the quilt.

Each column would be 3” wide.
I cut out a few cardboard models to envision what my quilt would look like. I realized that the dark blue piece in the pictures has the shirt tile flipped upsidedown.
I decided to make that piece with black fabric in the quilt.
I had a packet of colorful fat quarters that I thought would work really well.

I liked these colors and the colored in paper is after a lot of work making sure I balanced out all the colors.

Because it doesn’t repeat I needed to make a big template.

I decided I wanted my quilt to be 57” square (mainly because if it was 60 it would be considered a large quilt in my quilt guild competition).

Luke sent me a picture of a large section of quilt.

I took a part of that large picture and picked out the 19 column section (3”x19=57” that I wanted) and cropped it to be a perfect square.

It turned out to be able to fit on a regular sheet of paper. I printed a few copied to color in to plan out the color scheme.

I used colored pencils to represent each color. My colored have 8 hues with each a leaf shape pattern fabric and a wavy pattern fabric. I drew it on an envelope and then used the colored pencils to color in the small sheet of paper.
I had ordered from my local UPS store to print as large as they could a blown up of the image. They said they do 44”, but the first try they did cut off some of the tiles. Turns out their paper is only 42” even though the printer has the capability to do 44”. I resized it to a 41” square to make sure they did it right and had them reprint that.

UPS Store accidentally printed it too short.

I made another copy after I shrunk the size a bit.

Then I took time drawing out the divisions of the columns and sections as I did on my phone,

but then I discovered instead of cutting the diamond lengthwise, the pieces could be broken up much more simply and I would be sewing a lot of pieces that were based off of triangles and Y-seams.

With this discovery there were only five shapes that I was working with to make the quilt. In the above picture you can see that that T-shirt (they called it the hat, but to me it looks like a T-shirt) has three kite pieces, one triangle, and one mountain piece.

Here is how the pieces were looking for the start of column one and two. I realized that with only a fat quarter of each fabric to work with (which is only a 18"x 22" piece of fabric) I should do all my cuttings first, so I make sure I have enough fabric. 

I had to reference my little picture and map out each colored T-shirt on the paper. 

My column one through nineteen then had a shirt number for column and letter going down (1A through 1L and so on for each column. In order to cut out the colors I made these tables and cut out accordingly.

I was cutting them extremely close together. Because of the angles of the design I could really get a lot of the fat quarter. Luckily there was just enough, except on two colors where I ended up having to sew a little kite out of a couple pieces.

This came out extremely close and I almost didn't have enough fabric.

It felt like it took forever to cut them all out. I waited to cut out the black backwards shirts because I had plenty of that fabric. Here's what the piles look like...

I would color in each shirt once I put it's pieces together and pinned it with it's number/letter tag.

Then onto the assembly! Column one and two came together pretty quickly and you could start to see a complete shirt or two. 

Each time I would go down the column I would inevitable run into where I needed to take a piece from the column to the right, so I would go through the pile and pick out the one I needed. It also happened that when working on a column it would have some pieces that belong in the next column. In that case I would pin the piece to the sheet of paper.

And that is how I am assembling the aperiodic monotile quilt based off Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss's mathematical discovery : )

I just finished the first four columns out of the 19 planned, and it shouldn't take too much longer to finish the top. Once I have the top done I plan on quilting it with black thread and sewing a few millimeters from the edge of each T-shirt tile. Some of the colors (especially the blues) when they are next to each other blend a little and I think the black quilting will help distinguish them more.  

I can't wait to show you the finished product!

I saw on Reddit that one woman had worked on a very detailed block with about 16 pieces each. That looks like a TON of work. Good for them, but I think I made it as simple as possible, although this has still been a lot of work. : )