What Is A Tessellation?

I have done many posts about my adventures with Tessellations. I received a comment this week that made me think this is a  post worth repeating.

She said she NOW understands what a tessellation is after reading this. I hope if any of you are wondering this will clarify it for you too.

Tessellations from The Colors Of My Life series - Rerun

In reality all the quilts in this series qualify as tessellations since they are made up of squares.
One definition of tessellation is fit together without leaving any spaces.
The quilts I will feature are those where the shape of the design element forms a tessellation.
I will also share some where the design element comes close to creating a tessellation but doesn't quite.

The design formed by the four patches of individual colors in this quilt are NOT a tessellation. I had to fill them in with the one patch of a different color.

Each unit of color tessellates in this quilt. Each unit is made up of 18 shaded squares of a color. I wanted this quilt to be square so there are partial units along the edges. I could have continued them for full shapes.

This design is similar to the previous one but the units do NOT tessellate. They had to be filled in with the 4 gray squares.

The simple crosses form a tessellation in this quilt alternating black, brown or gray for every other cross.

When you first look at this you may say the shapes here do NOT tessellate. Keep looking and see if you CAN find the shape. It may help you to see the tessellating shapes if you squint or take off your glasses.

If you can not find it now look at the photo in gray scale and I think you WILL be able to see it. There are light shapes and dark shapes that tessellate with each other.

There are many other ways to create tessellated shapes. You can find some of them on my blog by putting tessellations in the box on the upper left hand corner and clicking on the magnifying glass. This is a fascinating adventure and I hope you will enjoy it.