Googol

Freezer-paper design for squiggle-drawing

I always enjoyed squiggle drawings as a child artist, would scribble a squiggle-drawing and color it in; squiggle a surface of interlocking lines, and color in the loops.  I decided to employ freezer-paper to implement this idea in fabric.  One can, of course make any picture on freezer paper, which will stick to fabric after brief touch of an iron, making it possible to cut out the fabric, leaving a seam-allowance, and then put the pieces back together (after carefully marking them!  It is easy to get confused once the pieces are cut).

Googol Quilt

I feel as though I used freezer-paper a lot, but only remember a few full-size quilts.  Two of these were googol and googolplex.  In the days I was making these quilts, I would usually be listening to Public Radio in the studio.  Music still had to be played on turntables with LPs, then  on CD players CDs, each set of technologies requiring expense and frustration.  I don’t remember where I learned about this mathematical concept; Science Friday?  In any event, it was long before personal computers, the www, the internet, or search engines; long before there was a google.  I thought it was the number before or after infinity, but am now looking it up; where it is described as 10 to the 100th power, or one followed by 100 zeros.  Googolplex is one followed by a googol of zeros.

Googol Quilt detail

I don’t have a picture of googolplex, as it was sold a long time ago.  It was made in muted tones, and was part of a challenge project assigned in an art-quilt group I was part of in Syracuse, called Eidolon. But Google is still in my collection, so I was able to take a new picture of it.