It’s been aaaages since I used Excel to create a Sunday sketch – I think the last one was Sunday sketch #335, which I posted almost a year ago. But I had an idea recently that I knew would be too hard to do in EQ8 (not impossible to do; just too time-consuming/annoying for me at my level of expertise), and because it’s all lines and squares, Excel is a perfect alternative.

The inspiration behind this week’s sketches was a similar motif that I saw on a bedspread in a photo for a real estate listing (inspiration is everywhere!). The original design was much more complicated; the arms extending from each hashtag joined up to create new shapes. But I didn’t want that. I just wanted to see how it would look to connect the arms of adjacent hashtags.

I started off small (and with a limited palette), just to explore the motif and its layout. Obviously, joining the bottom-right arm of one block to the top-left arm of the next one will create a stepped layout, which eventually resembles a slightly off-kilter square. All those intersecting lines create some shapes to colour in, too.

I liked the idea of extending those arms off to the side of the quilt. I’m not sure I’d make this design in real life; I’m not great at sewing (or keeping) long lines that straight. (I’ve never used starch, but maybe I should?)

So instead I tried packing the design from edge to edge with the hashtags, and playing instead with colour palette and placement. Excel doesn’t have a huge selection of pre-set colours, although you can input RGB colours if you want. I’m too lazy for that, so I just picked some bright, neon-y shades.

(I even like how those four look together!)

I’m not sure of the easiest way to construct this design, particularly for those versions where lines cross over or under lines of other colours. I guess there would be a lot of careful seam matching to obscure the joins between adjacent blocks. Otherwise, it’s just all squares and rectangles.

I know that the hash (#) symbol has been used in other quilt patterns, so I dug around to try and find some. If you like this motif and you want to use it in a quilt, check out these patterns:

• the #Hashtag quilt block and quilt pattern from Sew Can She
• the Ella quilt pattern from Kitchen Table Quilting
• the Hashtag paper-pieced quilt block pattern from Patch and Dot