I don’t often design quilts with lots of long straight lines, because I know how much it would annoy me to make a quilt that needed that level of precision 🙂 I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I try not to set myself challenges that I know will play on my worst characteristics!

But having said that, I’ve long wanted to design a quilt pattern that echoes the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree – the diagram that depicts the evolutionary relationships between living things. I saw one recently for genomic variants of the coronavirus.

So I set myself some rules (some of which I broke), and repeated sets of rectangles to create the feeling of going from large groups to small ones, and then even smaller ones.

I actually started with a vertical layout, and a different colour scheme.

But that layout didn’t give me enough room for different sized blocks, so I spread out sideways. And I kept it symmetrical, for a change!

I played around with a few colour palettes. I also decided I wanted to add even more blocks of different size, so inserted even larger blocks to the left of the design. This broke one of my rules, which was to use each block size in sets of 4. But I decided I didn’t have room for that approach after all.

After playing around with a few palettes, I hit on a design I liked. Then I decided I wanted it to be square(ish), so added another row (of large, medium, small, tiny and teeny blocks) at the top.

This design would be very easy to make into an actual quilt – it’s all rectangles, and the different sizes are all multiples of each other (e.g. 1 x 2; 2 x 4; 4 x 8; etc.). The hardest part would probably be counting up how many pieces you’d need of each colour, then keeping them organised after you cut them 🙂