Queen of Quilts

Actually, Quilts wouldn't make a bad 5th suit...

Elizabeth Clark is a friend and mentor to all of us in my family in many ways, but this post is about the specific inspiration of her quilts to me.

We were over today and she showed this amazing quilt: a Sierpinski gasket stitched over in lissajous and something like the Mystery Curve.

Wow.

For some reason this gave me a flash for how to do a similar thing in GeoGebra. Have a square where you set the pattern, and then use translations and dilations to propagate it. When you click a square it toggles a true/false value, which controls the color. Then in some of the patterns, I use the same Boolean value to determine of the translation happens.

I'm pretty happy with the results. I tried one generation further of the fractal, but it didn't show up well and increased computing time a lot. I know other people have made better and slicker versions of this with programming, but it's fun to make for yourself, too.

Of course, the interactive is on GeoGebraTube if you want to play for yourself.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to blog more about Elizabeth because she gave me one of my favorite problems, and she is endlessly creative.