Above: Swanson stands in front of one of the quilts she assembled using her tube piecing method.
EDIT 12/04/2015: Irena has alerted me to inaccuracies within this article. I have updated the article to reflect the factually correct information that it was Ernest Haight, not Ernest Hale who pioneered early quilting methods. Haight’s methods also work more generally than I mention. Also, Irena just discovered Rita Hutchens’ book on Tubular Piecing, Irena had been using Tube Piecing for years. Tube Piecing also works for all angles but sometimes 90 degree angle patterns are easier to accomplish with other methods.
Math professor Irena Swanson first learned to quilt from her foreign exchange sister during her visit to Utah from Yugoslavia. Now anything but a newcomer to quilting, Swanson has created a sort of innovation in quilting she calls tube piecing.
To understand tube piecing and its importance, first you have to understand how most quilts are made. Say you wanted a quilt with different colored triangles arranged into a rectangle for the pattern. Traditionally, quilters would cut out each triangle by hand with allowance for the seams that would hold them together, eventually stitching together all the triangles to create the finished quilt.
However, in 1950 Ernest Haight invented a more efficient method of piecing (or assembling the pattern of the quilt) that used fewer seams for sewing pairs of triangles together. His method also works for different scales of quilt patterns. Haight eventually discovered another method called strip-piecing, in which a quilter sews several completed strips together to form the quilt. In 2003, Rita Hutchens published the book Totally Tubular Quilts: A New Strip-Piecing Technique, which Swanson said she found years after she developed Tube Piecing.
Swanson says that she didn’t set out to create an innovation in quilting.
“I didn’t have the patience in the beginning and I started to simplify each step until I realized that I had created a new method of piecing,” she explains.
Though many of the simplifications were informed by her mathematical expertise, she stresses that the process involves no complex mathematics.
“[Tube piecing] uses a lot of trigonometry to calculate the desired angles in the quilt’s pattern,” she explains, “but aside from some trigonometry, the only other math [needed] is calculations for seam allowance and other variables.”
In essence, tube piecing works by making a parallelogram of alternating fabrics, stitching that into a hamburger-style tube, making cuts at the necessary angles, and ending up with several strips of the desired pattern. The strips can then be sewn into the overall quilt pattern, much like Ernest Hale did with strip-piecing.
Tube piecing is to quilting as the assembly line was to factory floors—it is more efficient and takes less time.
Swanson notes that “what would take 80 seams with regular piecing only takes nine seams with tube piecing.”
However, tube piecing works best for patterns that don’t require 90 degree angles. For patterns that do require 90 degree angles, Swanson suggests using a method called enhanced strip-piecing, which she pioneered after working with Ernest Hale’s method of strip-piecing. While Tube Piecing works for patterns with 90 degree angles, sometimes it is easier to use enhanced strip-piecing according to Irena.
After realizing she could make a lot of traditional patterns using her more efficient tube piecing, Swanson began to write a book on her revolutionary new quilting method. Her book is currently 360 pages, and she hasn’t finished it yet. When she originally approached publishers with her book, they cautioned that it had “too much math.”
With a wide range of patterns to cover, Swanson has reached out to friends to help her create more prototypes and to confirm her work. Most of all, Swanson wants to simply “be done with the book.”
Since receiving feedback from publishers, Swanson has slowly been cutting out the non-essential math in the book, adding higher quality photos, and recording instructional YouTube videos to host on her website. Swanson has preserved the general formulas for different quilt patterns in tube piecing within the footnotes of her book. In addition to the quilts you can view online at tubepiecing.com, Reed will display some of Swanson’s quilts in the spring.