I briefly sat down with my sketchbook the other day, drew one simple block, then immediately started up EQ8 to tile it and recolour it. I toyed around with placement too, setting the blocks on point, rotating some of them, and using the inverse colourway on others. I picked a lovely emerald-y green for the two-colour version.

Can you tell what the original block was? If you tilt your head 45 degrees, you might be able to see a few squares emerge from this design. And you can see that they’re made up of two 2:1 half-rectangle triangles (which are twice as high as they are wide). The two diagonal seams of the HRTs are parallel, and the HRTs are coloured so the middle of the block looks like a tilted stripe, with the two coloured triangles on the outside.

Messing with the orientation of the blocks introduces some lovely secondary shapes and lines. Of course, I opted for a symmetrical design!

This design could be translated into a quilt using all HRTs and a few squares of background fabric.