New Quilt: ICE!!

    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.

You can see the regions of the phase diagram where all the different forms of solid ice are found (labeled with roman numerals).  I wanted to fill each shape with some pattern abstracted from the different crystal structures of ice.  Most of the ice on earth is hexagonal ice, form 1h, seen over at the far left and its crystal structure is pretty straightforward.

When I started googling around to see what the crystal structures of the other forms of ice are, I found  Frank Hoffman's fascinating website.  He's an academic chemist and has a personal website/blog dedicated to crystal structures including lots of different molecular models for different ice crystal structures.  This first one is Ice IX and ice XV.  The second is one of my favorites, Ice II

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.

You can see here  (below) the layout in progress with the "negatives" rather than the "positives" (above)

All the pieces were fused down- come back next week to see the quilting and the final piece!