This week’s sketch feels a bit like the design equivalent of a ‘novelty’ fabric. (Although after googling that phrase, I’ve discovered that people seem to have different ideas of what that actually means.) To me, it’s a fun design featuring recognisable objects rather than just shapes and colours. In this case, birds!

Who knows where this idea came from. I wanted to try a half-circle combined with some orange peel units, and that’s where I ended up. I won’t show you some of the earlier iterations – let’s just say they didn’t look like any birds I’ve ever seen – but I settled on this cute layout to start.

I felt like I could make the whole design a bit more fun by adding in some different blocks. The birds had a retro feel, so I went with simple blocks that echoed some of the same shapes. The first one I tried was a simple flower using big curves. The second one I added was the block featuring 4 large orange peels in an ‘X’ shape. This mirrors the smaller orange peels on the bird’s tail. And the third one was a set of 4 circles (echoing the curves of the bird and flower) made from orange peels (echoing the bird and the X block). That way, the blocks are all tied together somehow.

A mixed-up layout feels more fun to me, so I arranged 5 different blocks (I repeated the birds in 2 colourways) in a 5 × 5 layout, one in each column and row. Then I tried to find as many retro palettes as I could. Some of these are made using the ‘Randomize’ feature in Electric Quilt 8, which can pop out some very unexpected colour combinations 🙂

   

   

   

   

Of course I had to end on my favourite palette of yellow, pink and orange!

I also tried a different layout…

…and different block colouring for each of the diagonal lines.

   

These designs can all be made using standard quilty shapes: mostly quarter-circles and orange peels. Some of the curves in the bird would need to be slightly odd sizes to accommodate the beak at the side (so the curves don’t span the full width of the block), but that’d be manageable I think.

Will I ever make this design? Probably not. But I still think it’s super-fun and worth sharing.

Speaking of which, the bird block led me to another fun ‘novelty’ shape, which is very basic but also makes me very happy, so I’ll share that next week.