Back to basics this week, with a very minimalist hand-drawn sketch.

I was caught out without my Rhodia dot pad, so just used a gridded Moleskine notebook that I always keep in my bag. The corners are a bit dog-eared, but it does the trick!

Sometimes I’ll redraw sketches in EQ8 so that I can play around with colour a bit. Having said that, I still struggle to find colour palettes that look good, so I tend to stick with the same colours/shades for awhile… this is clearly my ‘teal period’:

I originally wanted to keep the centre squares the same colour, to make it more obvious that they’re immovable regardless of where the ‘bars’ are coming from. But in the end, I liked a mix of shades and tints more.

It’s funny, but sometimes colouring a design will help me to see areas of imbalance or asymmetry (which I tend to avoid). In this design, I can see that I’d probably rotate the bottom-right square 180 degrees – both to avoid two adjacent squares having the bar jutting out from the top left, and to add a square with the bar coming from the bottom right, because there aren’t many of those in the vicinity. Then again, that would mean that 3 of the 4 corner pieces have the bar coming from the same direction… which might also bug me. Designs like this one can take me a long time to finalise 🙂

This design would be super-easy to make into a quilt… it’s all rectangles, squares and half-square triangles.

I realised afterwards that my design is somewhat similar to the ‘Corner Lot‘ quilt pattern by Craftsy.* I don’t know who the designer is (Craftsy doesn’t say), but I L♥O♥V♥E their colour palette!

 

* Not an affiliate link, because I don’t do those.