In the past few weeks of playing with pointed arches (or Gothic arches, if you prefer that name), I kept coming back to a simple curved shape made from two arches joined by a quarter-circle or orange peel. I’ve been calling it ‘the jelly bean’ in my head. Cos who doesn’t love jelly beans?!

If you’ve read the blog posts for Sunday sketch #433 or #434, you’ll know that I came across this arch shape thanks to Daisy Aschehoug (@warmfolk), who’s been playing with it and has even made templates, which she shared with me. I’m very grateful, as it’s sparked a bunch of new ideas when I was going through a bit of a design dry spell!

I’ll start with one of my favourite versions: columns of jelly beans pointing in different directions and coloured with an alternating two-colour palette against a third background colour. Here I’ve coloured the ‘butts’ of the beans (which are made from an orange peel unit) differently, just to add a bit of movement and visual interest.

I started off with solid beans, though, using a quarter-circle for that middle/joining curve. I like the movement in this design, although it feels a smidge ‘flat’. Still I think this could be a fun scrappy quilt, especially if the beans were all different colours (just like jelly beans!).

I also tried colouring the other side of the orange-peel version. This adds a lot more movement; I get some secondary swirls forming.

Back to the three-colour versions.

I also tried a different layout. It’s still a standard layout of horizontal and vertical lines – in other words, the blocks are not on point – but I’ve lined up the jelly beans and alternated their direction in each diagonal column.

And then I tried the same effects with this new layout. I love this one: cutting out the inside of the orange peels brings out lots of swirly movement – my eye moves round in big loopy curves.

Here are some three-colour versions: the first one uses the same colour placement for each bean, but changes their direction. The others alternate both the colouring and the direction. In those others, the peel from one bean makes a hidden circle with the rest of the adjacent bean. Can you see them? They feel more obvious to me in the version with the orange background: overlapping pink and blue circles, interrupted by a criss-cross of orange lacework.

Because the jelly bean is made from just three units – two arches and a curve, in a kind of L-shape – it can be arranged in lots of different ways. I also tried a kind of floral arrangement. I don’t love it, but maybe it will spark some ideas for you?

The one fairly obvious arrangement that I haven’t shown here is a star-like shape, made from a square of four adjacent jelly beans with their butts facing inward. As soon as I tried that, it led me down a loooong rabbit hole of new designs, which I’ll share next week!