Great Doodle Page
Fabrication
Designing the Great Doodle Page
Fabricating the Great Doodle Page was a collaboration between Dominique Ehrmann and Ingrid Daubechies. The shape of the Page was already determined (as the reverse of the Cryptography Quilt, which was designed and fabricated earlier) before detailed fabrication began.
Dominique first produced a design for the border, which was then turned into a vectorized computer graphic by Ingrid; after careful size calibration, this was the basis for printing of the border pieces (at 247 dpi) on cotton by Spoonflower.
The same procedure was followed for each of the sections. After the source material was decided, Ingrid and Dominique discussed a first layout, which determined the size at which the different drawings had to be reproduced. In most cases, Ingrid then redrew the sketches or drawings to obtain a vectorized computer graphic that could be enlarged to provide a crisp copy for printing on fabric at the correct scale. Exceptions were the Ada Lovelace drawings, for which the very high resolution digital version provided by the copyright holder was sufficiently sharp even at the scale needed, and the colored figures by Alicia Boole Stott, which Dominique pieced together from fabrics of different colors using standard quilt piecing techniques. In many cases, Dominique added exquisitely detailed stitching to the printed fabric to bring added relief to the drawings.
Sewing the Great Doodle Page
The individual pieces were sewn by hand onto the pale yellow ground fabric with its border, which had first been mounted, together with the Cryptography Quilt, onto the steel support structure holding up not only the Doodle Page and the Cryptography Quilt, but also serving as anchor for the Ball Arcs and the Cavalcade.
