I’ve been having a lot of fun lately, designing within rules that I’ve set myself. The rules don’t have to make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t always follow them absolutely, but I find them really helpful in guiding my creativity.

The design below is a 5×5 repeat of a single block: 4 rectangles staggered around a central square. Each rectangle can be a solid, or a half-rectangle triangle unit of two colours: the original colour (red, teal, navy or hot pink), and either yellow or white.

Mix them up enough, and it becomes hard to discern the underlying rules – although there’s enough regularity or consistency across the design that you can tell it’s not completely random or improv.

Even when I’m not creating a completely symmetrical design, I still try to find some balance between elements and colours. In this design, for example, I tried to avoid having more than one solid rectangle in any one block, and to make sure that the solid rectangles of each colour don’t appear more than once in any row or column. I also tried to make sure that adjacent blocks didn’t have the same yellow/white pattern. I’m fairly sure I managed to follow those extra rules, but you might find places where I’ve slipped up. I usually don’t mind, if I’m happy overall with the final design.

The design also works in a more limited palette of only 3 colours:

As usual, I can’t design which one I prefer. This is one of those designs that gets me really excited. I just want to get busy sewing!