You might’ve thought you were never going to see another straight line in my Sunday sketches – it’s been months since I posted a non-curvy design! But this week it’s squares within squares. A super-simple design with lots of opportunity for colour play.

That’s quite a busy design (although I like it); removing some of the colour (by replacing some of the pink with the background shade of off-white) helps to ease the load a bit.

Mixing up the colours, and the colour placement, changes the look and feel of the design again. In some cases, the right combination can produce a sense of transparency. I always find it funny how the same colour palette, just moved around a bit, can produce such different designs.

  

I’ve added sashing between the blocks to create a bit of breathing space, but the placement of the black squares within the sashing can be moved around, from the corners to the centres of the sashing:

   

I also tried a few versions with that outer sashing removed, so the black squares between blocks appear only in the middle of the design(s):

   

I even went a step further and removed the outermost edges of the blocks:

I love the crowdedness of that last version – it feels chock-full when the blocks are butting up against the edge like that. (It probably helps that this palette of bright, happy colours is one of my favourites!)

You can probably tell that to make one of these designs into a quilt, you’d just need lots and lots (and lots) of squares. There’s probably a sensible way to piece strip sets that you could sub-cut to save time, but I haven’t thought about it much. (I might though; it’s such a fun design.)

I figured there was probably something similar out there already, so I had a look through my Pinterest feed and a few popular designers’ catalogues. Sure enough, the Crossroads quilt pattern by Emily Dennis (Quilty Love) uses the same layout as one of my versions. The colour placement is slightly different, so Emily’s pattern emphasises the crosses at the centre of each block. But if you put your thinking cap on, I’m sure you could easily adapt this pattern to create one of these Sunday sketches. (Or just make the Crossroads quilt – it’s cute!)