Pattern of the Month
This month's Pattern of the Month is Divergence, a quilt that spent weeks living under the highly technical working title of "The Problem."
The design is based on the 150-year-old Zöllner illusion, where perfectly parallel lines appear crooked because of the way our brains interpret the surrounding angles. I became a little obsessed with figuring out how to turn that effect into fabric.
My first attempts focused on repeating blocks. None of them worked.
Eventually, I abandoned the blocks entirely and rebuilt the design from individual squares and half-square triangles. That's when the illusion finally appeared. The finished quilt looks complex, but the individual techniques are straightforward. The challenge comes from the layout itself and the careful placement of simple units across the quilt top.
The pattern includes instructions for throw, twin, queen, and king sizes. Rather than adding more blocks for larger quilts, the unit sizes scale up to preserve the proportions of the illusion. You'll also find instructions for both two-at-a-time and eight-at-a-time HST construction methods.
If you're curious about the design process, the cookie sheets full of fabric pieces, the inevitable math corrections, and Gracie's continued efforts to build a career as a quilt model, you'll find the full story in this month's journal post.