basic binary pillow

I had so much fun with my Basic Binary mini quilt that I decided to keep going and make this pillow.  I made it for a friend who was such a sweet cheerleader on Instagram as the mini came together.  She and her family recently moved into a new home so I thought I would make this pillow for her:

The grid of tiny 1" x 1" squares spells out their last name.  I offset it in linen and quilted it, adding some hand stitching in Perle cotton.

On the back- the same eyeglass print on my mini, and I used the same binding as well.   I did a zipper enclosure using the tutorial on Svetlana's site.

She was surprised and loved it!  I think I am going to make a habit of these....

basic binary mini

Have you guys seen the book Quilt Lab by Alexandra Winston of a2(w) yet?  I have to say, it is one of the coolest concepts in quilting books that I have ever seen.  It basically marries science and arts, with a series of science based quilt patterns and projects.  With each project, Ali gives a short "study hall" science lesson on the concept behind the quilt.  After spending 8 years in science based university studies myself, this totally appeals to the geek side of my brain, but even if the extent of your science knowledge is what you've picked up watching Big Bang Theory, you wold still love this book.  Case in point:

Basic Binary pattern.  You can put SECRET MESSAGES in your quilt!!  Now, how cool is that??  I knew I had to start here.  I knew nothing about binary but here is what I learned- all letters are represented by a series of seven 0's and 1's in a specific sequence.  In my mini quilt, I represented the 0's with black fabrics, and the 1's with colours (in this case, aqua, yellow and orange).  So, what looks like random improv piecing actually has an ENCODED MESSAGE!!

I used seven rows (of varying lengths, to add interest) and then the letters line up in columns.  So, for example, the first column is 100010, which is the letter b.  Want to know what my message is?  You can go HERE on Ali's web site and use the table to figure it out yourself......


.........but if not I will tell you.  It reads:

"buy wife flowers"

HA!  I love that I can now use quilting to send subliminal cheeky messages to The Hubs!  Now, I have to say it has not yet been successful, but I have faith.  Just you wait!

To quilt this, I used wonky horizontal lines to add to the random feel, but the vertical lines are planned- "buy" is quilted in blue, "wife" all in orange and "flowers" in yellow, with the two spaces quilted in match stick lines of all three colours.

The binding is a black with metallic gold print called Barcelona.

I geeked out the back using a piece of a glasses print sheet, and I added sleeves for hanging.

It now hangs on the wall, just waiting for The Hubs to decode it......I'm not holding my breath.