One of the calls for entry for our fiber artists group 4 Common Corners was Snow and Ice. I decided to take the nerdy approach for this piece again. Ice has many many different crystal structures depending on what the temperature and pressure is. Very few occur here on earth, but they occur in all kinds of crazy places in the universe like in giant ice planets and in the very upper reaches of the atmosphere where precipitation is nucleating. Scientists are still identifying new crystalline forms for ice (including many that aren't even stable) and it's a really interesting area of research.
I decided my quilt should be based on a phase diagram for ice; phase diagrams depict the range of temperatures and pressures at which you find any particular compound in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, and it's especially cool for ice because it has so many different solid (crystal and amorphous) forms. There are quite a few different phase diagrams depending on what range of temperatures and pressures you're studying, but I decided to go with this one, from a 2019 Nature paper.
I abstracted some cut patterns from all these different illustrations of ice crystal structures and then cut them out on my silhouette cutter. At furst I thought I'd use the outline of the crystals, I guess you'd call it the positive of the crystal pattern, but there was too much white space so I decided to use the negative for this one, that is, what was left over from the cutting after I removed the crystal outlines.
Stay tuned though, I saved these outlines to make a second piece with a similar design! The fabrics are all ones I've handpainted or dyed over the years, mostly silk and polyester. The background is some sort of white polyester with a slight shine to it.
All the pieces were fused down- come back next week to see the quilting and the final piece!
You are so wonderfully geeky with your sewing projects. I can't wait to see how this looks.
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