I’m posting a little out of order this week. If you’ve been following for awhile, you know that one sketch will often spark an idea for a second sketch, which will morph into a third sketch, which can lead off in another direction to a fourth sketch… and so on. When this happens, I usually post the designs in order of creation, so I can easily tell the story of how they evolved. But not this week.

You’ll see this ‘pinwheel flag’ motif (for lack of a better description) in an upcoming sketch, where it first started. But I like the simplicity of this variation, so I’m posting it first.

I tried to inject a bit of bright colour into this one, because my default palette with this dark blue is often white and grey….

In the variations above, there are secondary squares created by the closest quadrants of four adjacent blocks… so four white ‘flags’ create a white square, and four blue flags create a blue square.

But the flag colours can be mixed up to avoid creating those squares. I like to create designs that offer choices for colour placement, particularly with a limited palette.

I’ll do a bit more with this block next week. But in the meantime, here’s another variation, created by colouring in the secondary squares with the alternating colour. I also flipped the orientation of this one, to avoid potential problems.

I like how these two versions look almost chaotic and improv-y but are actually very controlled and rule-based.

All these designs could be made into quilts using a triangle-in-a-square block and squares. That’s it!