I love using Excel to design quilt patterns. It’s easy to set up a grid of squares, and quick to fill cells with colour. And who doesn’t love a red and white quilt?

I designed this on point in Excel and then flipped it 45 degrees in Illustrator.

You could make this design with a lot of half-square and quarter-square triangles, but it’d be much easier using strips, squares and rectangles. It’s actually one block repeated six times; you’d need to piece carefully to ensure that your white strips matched up.