The Modern Quilt Guild recently announced that its Quilt Challenge for QuiltCon 2021 (operating remotely as QuiltCon Together in February) is ‘wedges’. They define a wedge as “a 3- or 4-sided polygon that represents a segment of a circle or larger whole shape”.

I’ve never purposefully designed with wedges, but I was surprised to see that wedges have never featured in any of my Sunday sketches. So I set out to remedy that.

I sketched out a few ideas on paper before translating them into blocks using EQ8. My first session wasn’t so successful – I really wasn’t feeling it – but I kept at it. Eventually the ideas started coming. I won’t share them all here, but I’ll post a few over the next few weeks.

This is the first series, with simple wedges outlined by another wedge shape.

Some of the wedge outlines are coloured in black; the rest are in white (so disappear into the white background). Here it is again, coloured differently so the wedges and their outlines are clearer.

I added a slightly wider top and bottom border to the previous version, just so the quilt border didn’t interfere too much with the wedge outlines.

Here’s the same design, with all the wedge outlines (and some of the wedges) in white. It just makes the solid wedge shapes look a little skinnier.

So, I wasn’t that excited by these designs, but I figured they were a good start. Next, I tried the blocks on an angle, and in a different colour scheme.

This reminds me of snakeskin I think, or maybe fish scales. Here’s another version with a slightly different colour placement.

And… a rainbow version, just because.

And here’s a more improv-ish layout, following a few rules (see if you can spot them) but otherwise minus a few wedges here and there. This might be my favourite!

You’d probably need a template to make these wedge pieces. It’d be easy enough to make one, cut a bunch of wedge centres and border pieces, and chain-piece your way through a ton of blocks. Then it’s just a decision on how to arrange them!