Playing with Optical Illusion quilt ideas

I have been making some samples to see if I can adapt some optical illusions I have seen, at a favourite site of mine, into an art quilt but I keep coming up with something that is too much like a quilt and doesn't have enough 'art quilt' (whatever that is) for me.  I have a fascination for optical illusions and have posted about them before (here and here), with other links.

The idea is to sew a fairly traditional quilt of squares but to make the parallel lines appear to not be parallel.
The problem is that it just looks like my sewing was not all that straight - and it wasn't perfect, I'm not sure it is possible to sew so accurately anyway.  So any little dips in my straight lines seems to detract from the illusion.

This is the starting point, not all the lines are absolutely straight!

This works a bit, especially with the small image.  It has small pieces of fabric stuck onto the grid above.  It is not quilted yet, just sewn together and the pieces glued on.

This is the strips ready to be put into the checkerboard pattern and then pulled slightly out of line.  It is very hard to tell if the lines are actually not straight or if the illusion is working. It is quilted onto a cotton batting.

Even if the illusion worked better, I think I would not be happy as it is not a particularly challenging or interesting design.  It is basic cutting and sewing.  I want to get into art quilting but can't see what I could do to these samples that wouldn't destroy the illusion, so here I stop.


I expect I will abandon this whole optical illusion idea for the time being and see if I can come up with a new technique to experiment with.  It has been good for me in terms of practising accurate cutting and piecing and stitching in the ditch but that is about all at this stage.