New Quilt: Kirigami #4: Creepy Crawlies

Welcome to another installment of my series of Kirigami quilts.  This one started with this fabric I painted red orange for the front and dirty desert green for the back.  And of course quilted together!

Ever since I started learning about kirigami, I've been entirely captivated by RES structures (rotational erection system), a method of creating really fantastic 3D geometry from a single flat piece.  Professor Yoshinobu Miyamoto has really pioneered these structures, both from the mathematics side and from the origami/kirigami and architectural side.  I got completely lost in his flickr stream:  check it out here.  You can adjust these structures in a lot of different ways depending on the angle, shape, and size of the cuts and folds.  There are some mathematical programs for designing them that are above my level of understanding, but after looking at millions of pictures I figured out how to draft them.  I made a couple of different ones with different fold depths and angles, just to see what would happen.  Interestingly, a couple of them weren't well suited to application to quilts (I'll blog about those failures at some point).  This one worked well enough and I liked the shapes enough that I decided to make it in a quilt.  I cut the paper model on my silhouette after drafting in Adobe illustrator.

Interestingly, all of these kirigami quilts rely on folding, and fabric does not fold well.  I've discovered that the folds crease better if you stitch them down.  In addition, I wanted to figure out a way to mark the folds using the cutter since many of the folds have very precise angles but you don't want to cut them completely.  I thought if I used a dotted line in illustrator it would cut a perforated line in the fabric and that would serve as a fold guide.  Unfortunately, the laser cutter doesn't interpret a dashed line from illustrator (it reads solid lines only).  So I had to convert the dashed lines into outlined paths which was kind of a pain the first time.  Anyway, it worked out, and below you can see the fully cut solid lines and the dashed cut lines which are for folding.

After cutting, I used paintsticks to add some color and depth to the red sandwich.

Here you can see it "popped up"  the arms are pretty floppy since this is pre-stiffening, but I love all the arms!  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!