An Easy Way For You To Design

A Tessellated Quilt

A tessellated quilt uses a single shape repeated over and over to fill the space. You might think it would be hard to design a tessellating shape. But it's not.

There are several ways to do it. I'm going to show you my current favorite way.

Start by creating a random design on a 3x3 grid. This is the 1st block. The 2nd block is the reverse of the 1st block.

Use 2 of each block to make a kind of pinwheel.

In this example, the corners with the diagonals are always placed so that the diagonals are in the center of the new block.

The new block can be combined, by repeating it or rotating it, to make a tessellating pattern.

The tessellation is more apparent with several repetitions.

Every block has 4 corners. This example uses the same 2 blocks as the first example, but a different corner is used as the center of the new block.

When this new block is repeated or rotated new patterns result.

Again, these patterns are easier to see with several repetitions.

This example uses the same two blocks to start with but uses a third corner as the center of the new block.



One of these patterns turns out to be the same as one in the example above, except that it is shifted half a block up and to the left.

Finally the 4th corner is used as the center of the new block.

And again, one of the patterns is a repetition of a previous pattern.









In the examples all of the designs tessellated. This doesn't always happen.

If you create a design that doesn't tessellate, you can always throw it out. But you don't have to. If you like it, there is no reason that I can think of for you not to use it anyway.