Cafe Wall Illusion Quilt

The power was out all over the neighborhood for an hour on Sunday. We went for ice cream, and the ice cream store was also out of power, but the very cheerful young ice cream scooper kept sweating and scooping, reminding people he could only take exact change because the register was down.

It's very hot. And I'm quilting. I am about half done with the top of a cafe wall illusion quilt.

This will be my second quilt. Well, sort of. First there was the cathedral window quilt.

It is fun to work on, making the big white squares and little colorful squares turn into circles like magic. Because it is all sewed by hand, I realistically expect it to be large enough to cover the top of a twin bed by the time I turn sixty. So it is the first quilt I started, but it will not be anywhere near the top of the list of quilts I finished.

The first quilt I finished is Sullivan's scrap quilt. It turns out, it is much faster to make a quilt that is a) Sullivan-sized and b) stitched on a machine. Although, my favorite part is where I practiced a lot of embroidery stitches on the top.

About the Cafe Wall Illusion

If you make horizontal rows of blocks of contrasting colors, such as black and white, with narrow rows of "mortar" between them, in a color that falls between the colors of the blocks (in the case of black and white, the mortar is gray), and if you stagger the rows slightly, the horizontal lines will seem to slant into each other.

There is a famous building in Australia that illustrates the effect:

illusionism.org

At Quilting Adventures, Jessie helped me pick out a light greenish-blue fabric and dark greenish-blue, and a soft gray for the mortar. The lady who cut my fabric said, "What are you doing with all these solids?"

Sometimes, when I lack confidence, I talk too much. I think I said something like, "Well, I don't know anything about quilting, but I have this idea, there's this famous optical illusion, and it's all blocks of colors, and I was thinking, if I could sew it, I don't know why it shouldn't work, and my friend Dave teaches a perception unit, and he does optical illusions, and I thought it would be a nice present, so I'm going to try to keep it secret, but we'll see how well that goes."

She nodded. She probably has a lot of practice smiling and nodding at crazy people. "Well, that's the way to start," she said. "Start with an image." Then she recommended a book which I did not buy yet, but I intend to.

gwenmarston.com

The next day, I told Dave all about the quilt.

After cutting out hundreds of squares and strips, and sewing the blocks into rows and sewing the first few rows to each other, I ironed what I had put together, and was forced to admit the sad truth: the gray color was NOT working.

Naturally, my first course of action was to throw all the pieces into a reusable grocery bag, stomp around the house for a while, and eventually dissolve into a puddle of hysterics about something else, about how I don't know which consumes more fossil fuels: eating an apple or eating apple sauce. Because the apple sauce is made in large batches, and they can harvest the apples at the right time, and ship it so efficiently. You can't always trust your intuitions, and this is upsetting.

Dave said, "Is this really about the quilt?"

"No." Well, maybe. A little.

Later the same day, Cecily and I went back to the quilt shop, and I found some fabric in a color called SAGE.

I have some very good news: sage mortar is working.

See how the rows look all bendy, even though they are not bendy?

The quilt top is ten rows tall now. I'm not allowed to photograph it again until it's finished.

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More on the cafe wall illusion:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_cafewall/index.html

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/imager/contributions/flinn/Illusions/CW/cw.html

http://brainconnection.positscience.com/teasers/?main=illusion/cafe-wall

http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/machikae.html