This week’s design came to me in a dream – well, a daydream. That’s not such a big deal, because I spend quite a bit of time daydreaming about quilts and quilt designs 🙂

I’ve been designing a lot with curves lately, and I’ve been trying some block-based designs featuring two alternating blocks. I like there to be some connection between the different blocks, like a common shape or colour (or both). This week, I imagined half-circles in both blocks, but concave in one and convex in the other.

The convex ones are in the flower blocks, and the concave ones are in the star blocks. The two block types also share a central circle within a curvy star inside it. Although that’s not where I started… at first, the two blocks just had circles in the middle.

I didn’t mind that design, but the blocks felt a little empty. The simplest thing to put in those middle circles was another curvy star – repeating some of the existing shapes so the design doesn’t feel too busy or chaotic.

This makes three ‘areas’ per block for colouring in different ways (not counting the background)… the main flower or star shapes, the middle circle, and the centre star. In the previous version, I’ve used the same three colours per block but mixed them around a bit. In the first and last versions I’ve shown here, I’ve coloured one shape consistently across all blocks, for a more cohesive look: in the first version I’ve posted, the middle circles are all in the background colour. In the last version, it’s the centre stars.

I really like the movement in this design, and how the flowers seem to be nestled by the curves in the adjacent blocks. I think the negative space does a lot of work here in creating connections between the blocks.

This week’s sketches are all curves – quarter-circles or half-circles (or lots of drunkard’s path units). If the blocks were 12″ (finished), the curves would be 3″ (finished), which is about the smallest size I can manage well (smaller than that, and my curves get less curvy and more messy!). So the layouts shown here would be ~60″ plus whatever size border you wanted to add. Of course, the advantage of block-based quilts is that they’re usually pretty easy to size up or down.

Some of the shapes in this week’s sketch prompted me to take this design in a different direction, so watch this space for the next few weeks for a few related designs.