Pieces of the puzzle Orono quilter finds patterns everywhere, including in a popular newspaper game

Pat Cody was working on a sudoku puzzle in the Times of London when the black-and-white grid of numbers began to resemble a familiar

pattern.

So she took to her well-stocked sewing room and gathered vibrant scraps of fabric, fashioning them into a sequence similar to that which appeared in the popular newspaper game.

Sudoku, the addictive Japanese brainteaser that has been called the Rubik’s Cube of the 21st century, has created quite a buzz in the past year, generating books and merchandise ranging from board games to clothing to special writing instruments.

It even inspired an Orono woman to make colorful quilts.

“When I saw my first sudoku puzzle, I just thought nine patch,” Cody said, referring to the popular style of quilt that uses nine squares of cloth to make a checkerboard pattern.

Cody, a voracious quilter since 1982, also has quite an appetite for sudoku. “After that first game,” she said. “that was enough to get me hooked. Now I have scads of books on it.”

The puzzle, which appears in newspapers around the globe, asks players to fill in squares on nine-square grids with numbers from one through nine to create logical sequences without repeating digits within a single row or column. It first caught on in Japan in the 1980s but, since its reintroduction in 2005, has re-emerged as a popular pastime in coffee shops and in the workplace and as the subject of countless chat rooms, clubs and competitions.

Cody put her own spin on the game by creating quilts that use colors instead of numbers. Two of her pieces are smaller and can be played as tabletop games. The third is larger, big enough to use as a bedspread or to wrap up in on a chilly summer evening. She displayed them at a recent quilt show in Orono.

Over the past 24 years, Cody has been turning out padded coverlets like other people make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She made her first quilt in 1982 during a snowy winter in New Brunswick after watching a quilting show on Maine Public Broadcasting Network.

For her first, she stitched together hexagonal shapes of cloth to create flowers, a pattern often referred to as grandmother’s flower garden.

Since then, she has made quilts in all shapes, sizes and designs. She has done log cabin quilts, made of rectangular strips of fabric in light and dark colors sewn to look like the walls of a log cabin; mystery quilts, where the creator is given piecemeal instructions so the end result is a mystery; round robins, where each quilter stitches only a part of the blanket before passing it along to the next person; and flying geese quilts, made from a pattern of triangles arranged to look like birds flying in formation.

“I love scrap quilts,” she said. “I like bright fabrics. I have a huge stash and I always have to go buy more. I remember when I was a kid I would go with my mother to the fabric stores and I had to touch everything.”

Her sewing room is filled to the brim with spools and bobbins of thread in every shade imaginable. Fabric scraps cover her cutting table and spill out of shoeboxes arranged on a metal shelf. There are quilting pins with large plastic heads in various corners of the room, which overlooks her front-yard bird feeder and flower garden.

Cody usually gives her quilts as graduation gifts, but those still in her possession will eventually be donated to Project Linus, a nonprofit organization that provides handmade blankets to sick children.

A member of the Orono Quilters who also teaches quilting at Orono Adult Education, Cody admits that she sees sewing patterns nearly everywhere now, just as she did in her first sudoku puzzle.

“Quilters think of things a little differently,” she said.