What’s It All About?
Like all quilting blocks, the Stomachion is a geometric dissection problem. The only differences are the Stomachion is a little more complex than your normal blocks, and is 2300 years old.
Yes, 2300 years. The first reference to this block is from the Greek mathematician Archimedes, around 250 BC. He knew the different pieces could fit together in multiple ways, but he had no idea how many. It would be a long time before the puzzle was solved.
Around the year 2000, someone offered $100 to anyone who could figure out how many unique solutions were possible. Bill Cutler collected the prize. He used computer to prove there were 536 unique solutions.
While finding different ways the fourteen pieces can go together might be interesting to some people, the real value of the puzzle is in the myriad of beautiful patterns that exist and can be turned into one of a kind quilts.
The easiest way to use the stomachion in quilting is to take four copies of a block and put it a 4-patch. By rotating or flipping the blocks, you can easily come up with more than 30 different combinations.
Each block can have four different rotations, four more rotations after a flip of all the blocks, four more rotations after a flip of two diagonal blocks, four more rotations after the flip or two horizontal or vertical blocks. These all assume rotating all the blocks in the same direction. The blocks can be rotated in opposite directions, or some blocks can be rotated more than others. You would need a computer program to figure out all the possibilities.
But, there’s more. We can add color. We can have two colors up to fourteen different colors. Multiplying all these together, we have an endless array of possibilities. When we think in terms of quilting, we have to add all the possibilities of fabric patterns. It can be overwhelming.