This week’s sketch was a logical progression from last week’s (and the week before). It looks familiar; I’m not sure I’ve seen it as a quilt design, but I feel like we’ve probably all seen something like it as a surface design somewhere.

I’m using the same three-colour palette from last week. There are three areas of colour, so that means 6 combinations of non-adjacent colours (3 × 2 × 1). First up, the two versions with red circles (one with a cream background and blue borders, the other with a blue background and cream borders).

Then the cream circles…

   

And finally the blue circles.

   

Which one’s your favourite? I think I like the cream-background versions best.

I tried the design in a two-colour palette too, which I like. It feels quite different from the three-colour versions – it kinda reminds me of machinery, like Meccano maybe? (I just googled Meccano to see if it still exists, and the products are much more sophisticated now than they were in the 70s! I just remember a lot of hole-punched metal plates that you could screw together to construct objects. Anyway…!)

If you compare these designs to last week’s, you can probably see where the iterations are. Instead of two solid corners at the bottom of each block, I’ve moved one to the diagonal corner. So instead of blocks with a curved top and a flat bottom, I’ve got a circle encased in a large/wide orange peel shape. I’ve also separated the blocks with thin sashing.

I also tried a version where the shapes pointing in one direction are coloured differently from the shapes pointing in the opposite direction. I also removed some blocks to highlight the overlapping squircles (squarish circles) that are created by four adjacent blocks.

You’d probably still need templates to make this week’s sketch into a quilt, but you could create the blocks using quarter-circles instead of half-circles. Two quarters of the block would be drunkard’s path blocks (in which the curves are set in from the edge of the block rather than touching it), and the other two quarters would be curves with a thin border (which would touch the block’s edge).

This could be a fun design for featuring circles of a favourite print fabric (which would require a new method for insetting full circles rather than joining four quarters). Or it might even work with lots of colours, as long as the background and orange-peel outlines had consistent colouring across the blocks. Now that I’ve typed that… I have to try it! Here’s a quick multi-colour version:

Cute!

I do have a few prints that I can’t cut into because I don’t know what to make with them… maybe this is the design I’ve been looking for?

I’d probably add a border, just so those outer orange-peel shapes weren’t touching the quilt edge – maybe just a thin border to match the width of the sashing. I’d probably also opt for fewer blocks and bigger circles – maybe just a 6 × 6 layout rather than an 8 × 8. I’d want to practice a method for piecing full circles first though. I know there are a few different approaches, but I’ve never tried any of them!