Something new this week, after a few weeks of (mostly) the same thing.

I started thinking of these little shapes as knots, but the more I played with them, the more they reminded me of little cross-stitches. So I re-coloured them as if the same thread was winding its way across a canvas.

Of course, cross-stitching doesn’t use a different colour thread for the bottom and top stitch, right? So here’s each stitch in its own colour. Somehow this doesn’t feel as cute to me. Maybe I should’ve put that pale pink back in.

I had a bit of trouble with this design, and I would’ve liked to keep playing with it but I got too frustrated. The block is actually set on point – it’s much easier to design with the curves at the cardinal points of the block (north, south, east and west) than in the four corners; then the straight black lines can be horizontal or vertical (depending on which way the block is rotated).

But setting the blocks on point means you get whitespace at the four corners (which is what makes up those empty spaces between the blocks). If I wanted to recreate a cross-stitch-like design, I’d have the blocks in a straight grid with only a bit of sashing between them. But that would mean redesigning the block so it fills a normal square… which would mean redrawing it rotated by 45 degrees. And for some reason, recreating the curves on the diagonal and getting them the right size was just too hard for me. There might be a way in Electric Quilt 8? But I couldn’t find it. Using the ‘Serendipity’ features didn’t work. Even grabbing the whole design and trying to rotate it didn’t work. I dunno. I’m sure there’s a way, I just haven’t found it yet.

It’s annoying to have a design in my head that I can’t get down onto paper (or the screen). I’ll come back to it one day!