The whole point of my Sunday sketch series is to show quilt designs, so there’s an unspoken rule (at least in my head) that all the designs should be makeable. I’ve said before that the skills required to make a particular sketch into a quilt tend to match my own sewing skills at the time I made the sketch. In other words, my ‘design’ brain is pretty aligned with my ‘making’ brain. That’s why I didn’t really design with curves until I could sew a curve, and I haven’t designed with (m)any Y-seams because I haven’t yet sewn a Y-seam. (Not that anything’s stopping me! I just haven’t got around to it yet.)

Anyway, all this is to say that occasionally, there are exceptions. I’m pretty sure that this week’s Sunday sketch is makeable – I think you could use paper piecing, start with a few partial seams, and then sew all the pieces in each block a clockwise manner around the central square, finishing off by completing the original partial seams.

I’m not excited enough by this design to bother checking whether that construction method is indeed possible (or desirable). But I can still share all the iterations!

This Sunday sketch is a block-based design using multiple half-rectangle triangles. They’re joined to each other primarily by their diagonal angles rather than their short or long edges. There are three ‘sets’ of HRTs within each block; in the top design, two of the sets are in colour and one is in white. Here’s each set coloured differently:

That can get a bit busy, so I feel like it helps to have one colour that ties all the blocks together (in this case, white) and other colours that appear more than once.

The design can also use a much simpler palette too.

Or you could use an expanded palette but stick to one colour per block (as in the first version). Here it is again, using a white background instead of the dark blue.

I’d use paper piecing to make these blocks, because I feel like the potential for wonkiness would otherwise be too high – sewing a bunch of triangles along their bias edges would be a recipe for disaster (at least for me). I’ve never tried paper piecing with partial seams though. Is that possible? I feel like it should be. It might be easier with freezer paper piecing than with traditional paper piecing. Hmm… now I want to try it!