Quilt Poems
2024, 2025
Quilt Poems originally began as a NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generating Month) project to create a book of generative poetry. I encoded a library of common quilting patterns as data, selected corpora of word lists by category, then created software that creates poems. The software selects from the quilt styles and bodies of text to generatively create these geometric visual poems in the shape of a quilt pattern.
The software was written in Lua and is open sourced. One can use it to develop infinite new printable books of quilt poetry.
In 2025 I've added some additional patterns to the quilt data. I printed a chapbook in a small edition of 25. There is now a second print edition. And I created a daily quilt poem site with a new quilt-poem each day.
I continue to experiment with the form and output. This project has gone on to sprout new iterations including generative 3d quilts, animations and other computational media.
Output
Printable book PDF file
Project code repository on GitHub
Daily Quilt Poem site.