I started off a bit slowly when first designing with these pointed arches, but I ended up going gangbusters. It’s such a versatile shape. It works a bit like a triangle-in-a-square block, but the curves add a bit of oomph that means it pairs really well with quarter-circles and orange peels. That’s what I’ve been using in the past few weeks’ sketches, and it’s the same again this week. But this one might be my absolute favourite!

Gahh!! Every now and again I’ll come up with a design that I just LOVE, and this is it for now. This one makes me happy. It’s the combination of curves and spikes, the apparent simplicity… it kinda reminds me of balloon animals. But also of banksia leaves and plant prickles.

   

If you look closely at some of the later versions in last week’s post, you’ll see these shapes peeking out.

This week’s sketches are the latest in a series (starting with Sunday sketch #433) based on a pointed arch block. I first saw this shape on Daisy Aschehoug’s Instagram feed, and then she very kindly gave me a set of her templates when we caught up in France for the European Patchwork Meeting in September. I haven’t even sewn one yet, but it doesn’t matter… just holding the templates in my hand helped me to think about how I might use this shape. It took me a while to get back to designing after a few weeks away, but as soon as I came up with some ideas in EQ8… wow, they really snowballed into more and more exciting designs.

So, buckle up (or get a cup of tea and a bickie). I’ve got lots of versions to show you.

I love this three-colour version too (although I’d love just about anything in this palette…!).

A multicolour version is fun too.

But back to the two-colour versions for a while. If I colour the background in the same colour as the ‘teeth’ (the outer components of the elongated oval shapes), the teeth effectively disappear and the zig-zaggy bits are all that remain. They look a bit like holly sprigs, I guess, so let’s call them ‘holly’ for now. (Don’t try to make sense of how teeth have nothing to do with holly.)

   

In the version above with the red background, suddenly those shapes between the holly jump out at me. There are four in the middle of the design – can you see them? They’re like an outline of a four-leaf clover, maybe. I’ll come back to that shape in a bit.

But first, let’s try a different layout. I wanted to see how the same design would like on point (with the blocks on diagonal lines rather than laid out horizontally and vertically).

Yep, I still love it. Here are the same designs with only the background colour changed. (There are those four-leaf-clover-type shapes again!) I feel like these could be modern interpretations of an Irish chain design.

   

Before I play around with those secondary shapes, let’s take a little detour first. The ends of the elongated ovals are created using orange peels, and some peels are part of more than one oval. How about we colour those ones differently from the others? We get some fun cross shapes in the middle.

Those squares (on point) feel kinda empty though. If we fill them in, we get back to that four-leaf-clover shape again. I’ve filled them in with more orange-peel crosses, just for consistency. But I’ve coloured them differently so they’re not overwhelming.

Here’s a two-colour version…

And some other three-colour versions….

   

And, because the spiky bits look like holly, there’s a Christmas-coloured version 🙂

I like that light green / dark green palette – so soothing! – so I’ll stick with it for a bit.

In the next group of 4, the 2 versions in each row are just inverse colourways. The two versions in each column are the same colour placement, but with only the outer colour / background inverted. See what a difference that makes to which elements pop out first.

   

   

Remember that there were squares in the middle of the design, in the original version? In the next few versions, I’ve left the orange peel blocks in there, but I’ve rotated them (from crosses to circles) and switched the colour placement. I’ve coloured the inner corner of those units in the same colour as the peel itself (so the block effectively looks like a quarter-circle.) You can still make out the jelly bean shapes that featured in Sunday sketches #435 and #436 (which weren’t there in the previous 4 versions).

   

   

The diagonal lines of the squares bring back the sharp edges of the elongated ovals, which I like. And I see big octagons emerging from the designs too.

Or I can recolour the jelly beans so that their rounded middles (the orange peels) are in a different colour. That creates those inner circles without the straight lines defining the elongated ovals. (There’s a lot going on here; I hope you can follow my descriptions!) These next 2 versions are similar to earlier ones.

   

Even though there are no straight diagonal lines in the middle of the design, I can add them back in around the edges, creating a border around the whole design:

   

Now, there are two areas within these designs where orange peels meet: at the junction between 4 elongated ovals (where the peels overlap as a cross shape), and in the spaces where those squares were in the original blocks (where I arranged the peels first as a cross and then as a circle). Originally all the peels formed crosses; how about if I rotate them so they all form circles instead?

Again, the lines defining the edges of the elongated ovals are gone; this is fundamentally quite a different design than the one I started out with. (It’s probably closer to last week’s flower shapes.)

And throughout this post, I’ve hardly talked about the pointed arches at all – it’s mostly been about the orange peel / quarter-circle shapes in the middle of the jelly beans. But I’d argue that the pointed arches are an integral part of these designs. Without the arches, there’d be no jelly beans, and without the beans, there’d be no elongated ovals, and without those, there’d be no four-leaf-clover shapes… well, you get the idea.

I’d love for the pointed arch to become just another shape that ends up being commonly used in quilts, like the quarter-circle or the orange peel. I’ve had such fun playing with it over the past few weeks, so it’s definitely in my design rotation now.