My Latest Work in Progress: The Fractal Quilt

Even though I haven't posted about my sewing projects lately, I have been working pretty consistently.  My latest quilt, however, has turned out to be more time intensive than I expected.  This is an original design and I should have accounted for the "planning" time.  The actual sewing is pretty straightforward but like most of my originals, I get new ideas and change my mind as I go along. 

This quilt is for son #3.  He is in a math graduate program and understands math in a way that I never will.  I took a lot of math courses, but that was years ago and once I was in my profession the only math I used was to figure my time sheet every two weeks.

This quilt is based on a fractal called the Sierpinski carpet.  You can read about it here much better than I can describe.

First a few pictures:

As you can see, the whole thing is based on a nine patch block.  But the devil is in the details!  There are only 9 main 15 inch blocks.  From this point, I am only going to talk about the green blocks, because the brown printed ones are not patched. So the eight remaining blocks are made of 64 five inch pieced blocks.  These 64 blocks are composed of eight 2 1/8 inch blocks each for a total of 512 blocks.  And at first I was going to stop there.  But I got to thinking that I could add an appliqued block in the center of each of the 512 blocks to represent another level of the fractal.  So that meant 512 1/2 inch appliques.  This took a long time.  After that I was crazy enough to think that I could embroider another level onto each of the blocks.  But after spending many days with a variety of machine and hand embroidery techniques I wisely abandoned that idea.  Actually it is plenty busy enough without the additional embroidery.

The remainder of the quilt will have an inside border and then probably a pieced outer border of sorts.  I'm still deciding.  In the end it will be rectangular (I think).

I'm enjoying this, but it's hard to deal with the slow progress and I thought it deserved  a posting prior to completion.  Comments are more than welcomed!