I am an immersive learner.
What I don’t know, I immerse myself in until I understand it — and once I understand it, I feel free to make changes. How to sew? I read every book in the local library. How to make a quilt? Back to the library — mind you, this was years before the internet. Fabric dyeing? Research. Website building? By then there was an internet to dive into. Python coding? An innocent question to an AI, and down the rabbit hole I went.
This is how I have always worked. And it is how Beyond Symmetry came to exist.
I have always wanted to make original quilts.
Those early quilts copied from books and magazines were my apprenticeship — where I learned to cut, sew, and press pieces of fabric into blocks, and blocks into quilts. But from the start, I was looking for something of my own.
The quilting books of the time offered a selection of components and the vague instruction to arrange them “in a pleasing manner.” It explained a certain sameness to a lot of quilt patterns — but said nothing about symmetry.
Then I read Peter S. Stevens’ Handbook of Regular Patterns, and everything clicked.
Here was a method of generating repeating patterns using the operations of symmetry — rules, and names, for every recognized symmetry group. I made a four-cell tile of each group to learn them, and along the way made two observations and one deliberate act of rule-bending: first, that all patterns using square cells are alternating rows, columns, or cells; and second, that except for symmetry group p4, all cells are either right side up or upside down. The rule I bent was allowing sideways cells — because I wanted to see what they looked like, regardless of whether they were mathematically correct.
That decision took me beyond symmetry entirely.
I taught an early iteration of this method at Quilt University, where I held the double distinction of being the first Black instructor and the first male instructor.
I made some of the quilts from what would become the Library — some multiple times, in different colorways — but moved on, as I always do, to new interests and new methods. Celtic knots. Woven Celtic knots (the subject of one of my books). All Roads Lead Somewhere, a series of quilts based on a board game whose playing pieces were squares with paths running through them — and eight points around the perimeter where the paths joined. Sound familiar?
I moved from the city to the country. I took up hexagons, then divided hexagons (a hexagon divided into three equal pentagons), then spiraling hexagons like log cabins.
In October 2024, I attended the local Highland Games and on a whim bought a kilt. I wore it a couple of times and liked it — but it was a tartan, and I felt like a regiment of one. I researched kilt-making, started making my own, and haven’t worn pants since. I tell people I lost the W: I went from quilts to kilts.
The end of 2025 brought a new adventure: Python coding. I built a two-player strategy game played on a hexagonal field. And then an innocent question to an AI about using Python to draw lines brought me back to where I started — the tessellation library I had always known was too large for any book, waiting for the right tool to show it to the world.
Python was that tool.
Fifty years. One cell. Eight points. Twenty-four possible lines.
Well, would you look at that.