Every now and then I’ll come up with a design that I just LOVE, and this week’s Sunday sketch is the latest example. I am smitten! It’s the perfect combination of fun and quirky and happy 🙂

I started with one ‘cross-weave’ block that uses three horizontal and three vertical strips of colour against a background. They look cute in a standard layout with sashing.

Then I made a new cross-weave block in which a four horizontal and four vertical strips of colour makes nine internal squares. They look good too, but maybe less ‘cute’ somehow.

But sticking them together in an alternating layout introduces an element of imbalance that instantly makes the design feel a bit, well, wacky. It’s because I designed the blocks with the sashing included, and the size of the sashing is a smidge different between the two different block types. Nothing quite seems to line up perfectly.

Then I added a third block, which has five horizontal and five vertical strips of colour (and 16 internal squares of background colour). Adding a few of those into the mix changes things up again.

I love it in a monochrome palette too. It’s like a patchwork of patchwork!

When I sat down to actually think about how to construct this one, I realised it’d be a bit more complicated than it might first appear. I couldn’t find a standard block size (10″, 12″, 14″ or 18″, for example) that was easily divisible by all the different numbers of strips in each block. In each case, the measurements needed to be nudged up or down a smidge to get to a multiple of 0.25″ (I’m not interested in cutting 1/8 of an inch…! I know they’re marked on most quilting rulers, but… meh).

I could get around that by making the sashing of each block a different size (essentially using the sashing to ’round up’ the cross-weave bit to a standard block size). It’s not an insurmountable problem, but just an added layer of peskiness that might make this fun design a little less fun to make. I’m still very tempted to try though! The unevenness of the sashing is part of its charm, I think, so it wouldn’t matter if the measurements were all a little improv-y – as long as everything joined together OK.

I think this design could work well with prints as well as solids. I also think the actual construction could be fairly fast, once you’d figured out the dimensions you needed (and practiced your scant quarter-inch seam; any minor deviations in the size of your seam allowance would really add up quickly in a design like this). The more I talk about it, the more I can’t wait to try it!