Quilting Squares

We are presented with a variety of grids made of squares. The majority of the squares are gray, while others have a variety of background colors, emojis, text, and images. When multiple colored squares appear in the same grid, they’re often connected horizontally or vertically. Combined with the flavor of making a quilt, it seems reasonable that we want to connect these grids in a way that creates a crossword grid. There are 1156 squares total, which implies we want to make a 34x34 grid.

By searching for the “MIT Gala” mentioned in the flavor text, we find the Met Gala. The Met Gala funds the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Searching for the Costume Institute plus “dictionary” leads us to the exhibit In America: Lexicon of Fashion. We can confirm that this is the right data set with the images, which are close-up screenshots of various outfits.

In this exhibit, outfits are associated with a word, such as JOY or ASSOCIATION. Thus, we can construct the crossword grid where the rows and columns match the colors and images of the outfits and are filled with the outfit’s associated word. Note that there is no online resource that contains all of the outfits used in this puzzle; the Met’s Exhibition Object page and their YouTube videos have all the outfits used in this puzzle.

Here is the list of words and their associated outfits. A few squares have colors that do not appear in the associated outfit.

Word, wrong colored letters in brackets	Corresponding row/column
A[R]TFULNESS					🌻		🌻		🌻
ASSERTION				HBA
ASSOCIATION
ATTACHMENT
C[A]MARADERIE			A	B
CLOSENESS
COM[F]ORT
COMMAND
DISCIPLINE
DRE[A]MINESS	🎀		💐					💐		💐
EASEFULNESS
EXUBERANCE
FACILI[T]Y	🎀
FELLOWSHIP						T
GENTLENE[S]S
GRACE
HARMONY
IDEALISM						🇺🇸
JOY
KINSHIP
NOSTALGIA		🏠
NURTURAN[C]E
PLAYFULNESS
[R]ENEWAL		💀				👀
RESP[E]CT				😐		😐
RESPON[S]IBILITY
REVERENCE				🔴
[S]OLIDARITY				🇺🇸
STRENGTH
S[U]STENTATION
SWEETNESS					🎀
SYMBIOSIS
TEN[D]ERNESS
VIBRANCY			🌻			🌻
WARMTH
WONDER		🎀

Here is the stitched together crossword grid.

There is one line of colors that does not correspond to any outfit in the Met exhibit. Additionally, it is not connected to the rest of the crossword grid. These colors also match the squares that were colored incorrectly, which are outlined in bright green below. Using this line of color as an ordering for the incorrect colors, we get the phrase CRAFT US A DRESS.

CRAFT US A DRESS is a partial answer for this puzzle. Upon submission, we get the message "Please CRAFT US A DRESS that would fit in the Lexicon of Fashion. Draw your dress on this mannequin that we have provided for you." We would also get the following image:

After emailing a dress design, we get the following response email:

"Thank you for the dress! In the meantime, we've sewn the upper layer for the quilt. We love how the colors shine through!"

The first image is a grid of 34x34 squares, which matches the size of our original grid. Each square is composed of two triangles. The top left triangles of some squares are transparent.

The second image is the first grid overlaid over the final crossword grid. The transparent triangles reveal some of the letters of the crossword grid as well as all CRAFT US A DRESS ordering squares. The 3x13 rectangle of white squares in the second image that are next to the CRAFT US A DRESS ordering squares indicate that (1) we should reuse the CRAFT US A DRESS ordering and (2) we’ll want 3 squares of each color. We now note that the bottom triangles exclusively use the colors of CRAFT US A DRESS and, if we look at only the squares that overlap with the crossword, there are 3 bottom triangles of each color. This means we can safely ignore all transparent triangles that don’t overlay words in the crossword grid. For each color, we read top-down left-right for the phrase STITCH LEFT PETTICOAT WITH RIGHT HARNESS NINE. This is a charade for PETTIcoat + harNESS, which yields the answer PETTINESS.

Authors' Notes

Tracey: It's also CRAFT USA DRESS! I'm weirdly proud of this pun.