I can’t remember what inspired this week’s sketch (I’m sure something did), but I immediately fired up Microsoft Excel to get the design from my head onto the screen. For designs with stripes and squares, particularly when the layout is a little unusual, I often find Excel easier and quicker to use than Electric Quilt 8.

This is one of my favourite versions of the design, but it’s not where I started out.

I began playing with large areas of empty boxes and filled boxes, nestling the filled boxes in the corners created by the empty ones.

Part of me likes that weird extra bit of background space at the bottom left of the design, but another part of me really does not 🙂

A slightly different arrangement eliminates that weird space…

…but it also requires an imbalance between the number of filled and empty boxes. Can I live with that? Well, let’s just say I kept iterating the design haha.

I also tried different ways of mixing the filled boxes and the empty boxes….

   

I prefer the version on the right, but there are some non-square shapes (in light blue, between the dark blue boxes) that really jump out at me and kinda disrupt the otherwise orderly grid. Hmm. Let’s keep iterating.

I hung on to the same large and small / filled and empty boxes, but just tried alternating them across the design instead. Ooh, I like this!

I gave up tiling the shapes after awhile, but then I decided I liked that empty space at the top!

Anyway, although I like these smaller cross shapes, the edges of the design end up looking quite messy (to me). Lots of the boxes need to be sliced through; there’s no easy way to find vertical or horizontal cut-off points where they’re all left intact. I don’t mind it, but I don’t love it.

So instead, I tried the larger shape, which somehow helps to avoid that problem. See how most of the shapes along the edges are retained, with only a few of the empty boxes extending beyond the edges of the design (effectively being cut off)? And only one filled box is cut off at the bottom of the design. Ahhh, that feels better.

So essentially it’s the same as the first version I showed above, but with a bit of extra whitespace (bluespace?) to rest your eye. That’s the sort of change I’d probably make if I were to make this design into a quilt for a modern quilt show.

I also think that last version would look good with an on-point layout. That’s a bit harder to do in Excel, so just tilt your head to the side to see 🙂

After creating these designs in Excel, I moved to Electric Quilt 8 and tried to recreate them there… with no luck. Electric Quilt 8 is great for recolouring designs (Excel is not), but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out an easy way to do this design. I would’ve had to use the ‘Custom’ layout, I think, which I don’t really like using (I just find it slow and a bit annoying).

Making one of these designs into a quilt would involve a bit of thought and planning. In most cases, I think the design could be broken up into columns (or rows) without necessitating seams within shapes, but there would be places where you’d need to include some extra strips going in different directions. I think it’s doable, just not completely straightforward. But I’m really tempted to try it!