I sewed a quilt with a pattern made from a bitmap of my partner Michelle's face.

It all started with a very nice photo of Michelle at a ferret owners meeting, taken in 1998.

I decided to make it into a patchwork quilt. I had made monotone black and white quilts before, but I decided it was time to take the process further and make a coloured image quilt.

First I shrunk the image to 80 by 74 pixels, and reduced it to 8 colours. I dithered it in Graphic Converter on a Mac, with a pre-chosen palette of red, blue, yellow, cyan, magenta, green, black and white.

Then I exported the image in the Graphic Converter ASCII format, which specifies each pixel by the number of it's colour. After deciphering the palette, I printed out the plan and started work. Sewing 5924 little squares of cotton together in exactly the right sequence can be a bit boring at times, so I'll spare you the details. The quilt has sat idle for about 4 years now, but I thought it would be nice to finish it for Valentines day 2005. Click the image below for a slideshow zooming in on the quilt.