Computers are inescapable. Even the timeless art of quilting has fallen to their siren song.
Yes, there is a quilting app — and a rather sophisticated one at that — thanks to a Harvard grad student who combined her love of quilting with her drive to write code.
Grad student Mackenzie Leake developed the app as a way to facilitate the increasingly popular foundation paper piecing quilting. For all you non-quilters, that’s the technique in which you sew your fabric to a printed paper foundation. The paper is removed before the piece is quilted. The technique is gaining popularity because it allows you to make complex patterns easily and accurately without doing a lot of math or dealing with fabric stretch.
Okay, enough quilting talk. What does the app do for you? Quite simply, it makes the process more foolproof by making sure the pattern you want to use will lend itself to foundation paper piecing.
In her dissertation (yes, she wrote a quilting dissertation), Leake explained that “the construction process imposes constraints on the geometry of the pattern and the order in which the fabric pieces are attached to the quilt. Manually designing foundation paper pieceable patterns that meet all of these constraints is challenging.”
To meet that challenge, Leake and fellow researchers mathematically formalized the foundation paper piecing process and used this formalization to develop an algorithm that can automatically check if an input pattern geometry is foundation paper pieceable.
Their process uses hypergraphs, generalizations of graphs in which an edge can join any number of vertices. The team used acyclic hypergraphs for non-circular dependency to design software that determines if an input design can be rendered into an acyclic hypergraph. If it can, the software then outputs all possible quilting patterns.
Leake, whose mother taught quilting, has been making quilts since she was eight years old. “In the back of my mind I’ve always had this dream project of incorporating quilting into my research,” Leake said. Now it looks like she’s done it.
Leake is excited (and yes, quilters can get excited; mathematicians can too) that her work will help quilters expand their artistic possibilities as they design their own patterns. Her app was released on August 18. You can watch a presentation of Leake’s mathematical foundation for foundation paper pieceable quilting on YouTube.