This has to be my absolute favourite colour combination at the moment. It’s so far from any colours I have around me in real life, but I really gravitate towards this palette in quilting for some reason. The warm yellow, the hot pink, the vibrant orange… I love them together.

This design actually started here…

How 80s is that?! You can see that the colour palette is the same one I used in Sunday sketch #258 – lots of bright, happy colours. And then I added the black lines – mostly because I wanted a dark colour and couldn’t find anything else that worked. All those black lines are maybe a bit overwhelming… so I tried switching them to the same colour as the background rectangle in each block. I used a grey background to differentiate the white blocks.

This is cute, but… I felt like I could make it a bit more interesting. So I tried mixing two colours per block (in addition to the white background): one for the rectangle and one for the strips. There’s a lot going on in this design, so it helps (me) to arrange the blocks facing in the same direction. I also added sashing (with the same width as the other strips) to separate all the colours.

I decided maybe that there were too many colours, so I pared the palette back to just three: my favourite mix of yellow, pink and orange. Still using two colours per block, I went back to the original design, where each set of 4 blocks creates a pinwheel / windmill effect with the strips. The sashing still helps to introduce some white space so the overall design’s not too overwhelming.

The design above is similar, but not identical, to the first one in this post. The blocks are all in the same position, but they’ve been rotated/flipped.

And using this same limited palette, I also arranged the blocks with the lines all parallel. Here’s that design with and without sashing.

The version without sashing is a bit too crowded for me, but it did give me some ideas of where to take this design next. Check out next week’s Sunday sketch for the results!