Last week I tried a new-to-me quilt block: triangular log cabins (basically concentric triangles of alternating colours). That little experiment sent me down a rabbit hole of other log cabin shapes. So this week it’s quarter-circles!

In fairness, most of the other shapes I tried were fairly boring (I couldn’t find anything new or interesting to do with rectangles or squares). But the quarter-circles immediately felt fun and different. Here’s where I started….

If you look closely enough, you might be able to see that every other block is not just rotated but also coloured slightly differently to its neighbours: in some blocks, the inner shape is pink, and in others it’s the background blue. When the same background colour is used for all the blocks, some of them have 3 layers of quarter-circles but others have only 2.

That first version piqued my interest – there’s some fun movement in the design (pinwheels!), and I don’t think I’ve seen another design like it. But it still felt like it was missing something. How about if I use a different background colour for half of the blocks – the ones with only 2 apparent layers? Then the ‘hidden’ third layer would magically appear! Here we go.

Now an interesting secondary shape appears (a kind of apple core shape), and there’s a great push/pull between the two colours – which is the foreground and which is the background? On its own, this is a fun two-colour quilt, so of course I tried it in a bunch of different palettes.

   

   

As much as I love this design, I felt like I could iterate it further. The original versions use a standard layout, so what might an on-point layout look like?

I didn’t tile the blocks all the way to the edges of these versions, because on-point layouts have half blocks at their edges and quarter-blocks in their corners, which would’ve cut off the log cabins and made the design look a bit messy. Instead, I left some space around the edges to let the blocks float in the middle.

As much as I like these versions, I feel like those edge blocks are a bit too much. What if I removed them, and kept only those blocks that create a complete secondary (apple core) shape?

Ahhhhh. This design ticks all the boxes for me: relatively simple, yet visually interesting; balanced but not completely symmetrical; dynamic and different. And a two-colour palette, which means I don’t have to agonise quite as long over what colours to use 🙂

   

   

Like last week’s sketch, this week’s would require templates and/or paper-piecing to make into a quilt. I’ve never tried curved paper-piecing, but I know it’s doable – have you seen Steph Skardal’s work? As I write this, she’s posting progress pics of a curved paper-pieced quilt on her Instagram feed. She’s used the same technique on other quilts too (see here, here and here for some recent examples).

I thought I was smitten with last week’s sketch, but I’m fully in love with this one. I’m not sure I have it in me to actually make it, but it’s definitely on the list of potential makes. Watch this space!