{"id":2414,"date":"2025-06-02T19:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T23:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/?p=2414"},"modified":"2025-06-03T22:46:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T02:46:17","slug":"aa-in-lorrievision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/2025\/06\/02\/aa-in-lorrievision\/","title":{"rendered":"AA in Lorrievision"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

During my 2013 sabbatical I quilted a pixelated self portrait<\/a>, based \u00a0on the Salvador Dali painting\u00a0Lincoln in Dalivision<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1977), which was inspired by\u00a0Leon Harmon\u2019s grey photomosaic of Abraham Lincoln<\/a>\u00a0(1973) that was published in Scientific American<\/em>. Twelve years later, I decided to take a similar approach to creating a portrait of a dear colleague and renowned privacy scholar who is moving to another university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began with a photo of my colleague, brightened the colors, ran it through a pixelator, and cropped it a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I printed out the pixelated image, tacked it to my design wall, and began digging through my quilting fabric stash for matching colors. I cut 2.5-inch squares of fabrics and tacked them up next to the printout. I easily matched all of the blue and off-white pixels, but struggled to find enough of some of the other colors and had to resort to some duplicates. I asked a friend to contribute a few fabrics from her stash, which helped to add some more gold, brown, and black pixels. I also used some fabric scraps from garments, including corduroy, liknit, brocade, and some shiny gold fabric (which I also reversed and used its matte back). I designed a label for the back and uploaded it to spooflower.com for digital printing. While I was at it I printed the original image, the pixelated image, and the CMU Scotty dog mascot in 2.5-inch squares as well. Then I drew a 2.5-inch grid on a piece of light-weight fusible interfacing and transferred the squared from my design wall to the interfacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once everything was transferred (and after a 4-day power outage that delayed this project), I used my steam iron to fuse the squares to the interfacing. Then I folded along each vertical line and sewed each column with a 1\/4-inch seam allowance. I clipped the seams at each horizontal line and pressed the rows in alternating directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then I folded along the horizontal lines and sewed each row.The result was a reasonably neat grid of squares without having to piece each one individually. The squares came out less square than I had hoped. The columns were almost perfectly sized but the rows came out a bit shorter than I had planned — note to self that the seam allowances in the second direction may “eat” more fabric than intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next I layered the quilt top on a piece of  fusible polyester cotton batting<\/a>, and layered that on top of a fun newsprint fabric leftover from a dress I made my youngest daughter<\/a>. I fused it all together and selected embroidery threads to match the colors in the quilt top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Finally, I was ready to quilt! I used my free-motion quilting foot to quilt the top with squiggles, basically doodling with thread. I signed my name in thread in the lower right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then I cut 1.25″ bias binding strips from a square of fabric and used my bias binding tool to make double-fold binding using my favorite technique<\/a>. I sewed the binding to the front of the quilt, glue basted it to the back using Elmer’s glue<\/a>, and then hand stitched in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the power outage delay, I finished the quilt just in time to present at a scheduled farewell event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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AA in Lorrievision, 2025, 18″x30″, quilting cotton and assorted scrap fabric, machine quilted<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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During my 2013 sabbatical I quilted a pixelated self portrait, based \u00a0on the Salvador Dali painting\u00a0Lincoln in Dalivision\u00a0(1977), which was inspired by\u00a0Leon Harmon\u2019s grey photomosaic of Abraham Lincoln\u00a0(1973) that was published in Scientific American. Twelve years later, I decided to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14,64],"tags":[11,6],"class_list":["post-2414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy","category-quilts","category-sewing","tag-finished","tag-quilt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2414"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2506,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2414\/revisions\/2506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}