I know, I know – I use this palette all the time. But I love it! And for happy retro designs like this one, it seems to fit perfectly.

So this week’s sketch is a direct descendent of Sunday sketch #388. In that design, I used an alternating layout of 2 block types: one with a 4-petaled flower, and one with a set of 5 curvy stars. I really liked how the concave curves of the stars matched up with the convex curves of adjacent flowers, and I started playing around with other block designs that would do something similar.

The flowers are bigger and the stars don’t look like stars anymore, but I still love how the edges of each block fit alongside the edges of its neighbours. The simplicity of the blocks’ centres helps to offset all the action at their edges.

All that’s left to do is play with colour placement!

I’ve said before that with designs like this, I try to reduce the ‘busy-ness’ by colouring at least one element of all the blocks in the same way, so the eye has somewhere reliable to rest. In the first two designs, the middle curvy star in each block is coloured the same as the background. In the next two versions, it’s the middle circle that’s in the background colour. It just means that your eye can find something common between any two adjacent blocks.

 

I tried a simpler version of the design, with solid centres, but… meh. Those big circles distract from the interesting edges, I think, and they’re just not that visually appealing. Maybe if you had a patterned fabric that you wanted to fussy-cut, it would be worth it, but otherwise I prefer the other versions.

 

Oh, and I wanted to try a larger palette, so here’s my usual 5-colour palette for a 5 × 5 layout, where each colour appears twice in each row and column (ideally; it doesn’t always work out that way by the time I get to the last row…!). Again, you can see where I’ve used the background colour for the same components in each block: the stars in the first version, and the circles in the second.

 

In the busier palette, I prefer the version that uses more background colour (the one on the right) – it just feels like there’s more breathing space.

You could make this design into a quilt using quarter-circles, half-circles and orange peel blocks. Lots and lots of them. The half-circles would end up pretty small; in a 12″ block, they’d be 4″ wide. If you don’t like small curves, you could aim for 18″ blocks, and either make a 4 × 4 layout (72″) or just embrace a 90″ quilt (yikes!).